Description
A vulnerability in the rm utility of uutils coreutils allows the bypass of safeguard mechanisms intended to protect the current directory. While the utility correctly refuses to delete . or .., it fails to recognize equivalent paths with trailing slashes, such as ./ or .///. An accidental or malicious execution of rm -rf ./ results in the silent recursive deletion of all contents within the current directory. The command further obscures the data loss by reporting a misleading 'Invalid input' error, which may cause users to miss the critical window for data recovery.
Affected products
uutils: coreutils
References1
- github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/9749 ExploitIssue TrackingVendor Advisory
Metrics
- CVSS 3.1
-
5.6
MEDIUM
Score source: CNA
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:L - EPSS — exploit probability
- 0% percentile: 6 · as of 13 November 2026
- CWE
- CWE-22
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