Flawfinder output manipulation via untrusted filenames and source text
Date: 2026-06
Affected: pip/flawfinder
Attack vector: other
Category: vulnerability-disclosure
Severity: Low
CVE: CVE-2026-48813
CWE: CWE-74
CVSS:  (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:N)

### Impact This vulnerability is an improper input neutralization issue leading to output manipulation, specifically, Terminal/ANSI Escape Sequence Injection and XML Injection: * Terminal Output Spoofing: A malicious file whose name contains ANSI escape sequences can end up being included in flawfinder's standard terminal output, with many effects. For example, this might allow an attacker to hide critical scan results, falsely making it appear to a human reviewer that no security issues were found. * CSV and XML Injection: Untrusted fields (such as filenames, categories, or code context text) were not properly sanitized when generating structured reports. An attacker could exploit this to corrupt CSV formats or inject arbitrary XML attributes into SonarQube outputs via output_sonar(). It impacts those who use flawfinder to evaluate intentionally malicious filenames or file contents. The initial filename injection problem was reported by Dan Lenz https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-lenz/ The other vulnerabilities were found by flawfinder project leader David A. Wheeler, GitHub david-a-wheeler, https://dwheeler.com/ ### Patches This issue has been fully patched in Version 2.0.20 (released 2026-05-16). All users should upgrade to version 2.0.20 or later immediately. If you use Python's package manager, you can upgrade using `pip install --upgrade flawfinder`. If you are consuming flawfinder via GitHub Actions, ensure your workflow points to david-a-wheeler/flawfinder@2.0.20


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):