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CVE-2026-54161

high

Network UPS Tools is a collection of programs which provide a common interface for monitoring and administering UPS, PDU and SCD hardware.

Network UPS Tools is a collection of programs which provide a common interface for monitoring and administering UPS, PDU and SCD hardware. From 2.8.3 to 2.8.5, upsmon in clients/upsmon.c inserts the server-supplied ups.alarm value into shell commands executed by notify(), async_notify(), and wall(). When a monitored device reports an ALARM state and an operator has configured NOTIFYCMD with EXEC in NOTIFYFLAG ALARM, shell metacharacters in the alarm text are evaluated on POSIX or Windows and can execute arbitrary operating-system commands as the upsmon account, which is commonly root. An attacker can control the value through a malicious or compromised upsd, a man-in-the-middle on a plaintext upsd to upsmon connection, or a compromised UPS device whose driver supplies the alarm upstream of upsd; TLS between upsd and upsmon does not mitigate the compromised-device path. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.8.6.

CVSS
8.1
8.1 (CVSS v3.1)
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Severity source: NVD CVSS v3.1 (security-advisories@github.com)
Timeline (UTC)
Published: 2026-11-03 20:18
Modified: 2026-11-03 23:17
NVD status: Received
Last synced 1 day ago
Verified against the source API 2026-11-03 23:24 UTC
Exploitation
Not listed in CISA KEV (as of last catalog sync)
Absence from KEV does not mean a CVE is not exploited. Exploitation status: unknown (no authoritative evidence in our sources).

Affected products

Not reported by the source (unknown — not "none").

Weakness classification (CWE)

Source: NVD / CISA. “NVD-CWE-Other” and “NVD-CWE-noinfo” mean NVD could not assign a specific weakness.

Mitigation & advisories

No vendor advisory or patch reference tagged by NVD. Check the references below.

References

Data sources

NVD CVE API 2.0 — fetched 2026-11-03 23:24 UTC · record ↗

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