Cyber Resilience

CVE-2023-24538

CriticalRCE

Published: 06 April 2023

Published
06 April 2023
Modified
12 February 2025
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score v3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0076 73.8th percentile
Risk Priority 20 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2023-24538 is a critical-severity Code Injection (CWE-94) vulnerability in Golang Go. Its CVSS base score is 9.8 (Critical).

Operationally, ranked in the top 26.2% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

Templates do not properly consider backticks (`) as Javascript string delimiters, and do not escape them as expected. Backticks are used, since ES6, for JS template literals. If a template contains a Go template action within a Javascript template literal,…

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the contents of the action can be used to terminate the literal, injecting arbitrary Javascript code into the Go template. As ES6 template literals are rather complex, and themselves can do string interpolation, the decision was made to simply disallow Go template actions from being used inside of them (e.g. "var a = {{.}}"), since there is no obviously safe way to allow this behavior. This takes the same approach as github.com/google/safehtml. With fix, Template.Parse returns an Error when it encounters templates like this, with an ErrorCode of value 12. This ErrorCode is currently unexported, but will be exported in the release of Go 1.21. Users who rely on the previous behavior can re-enable it using the GODEBUG flag jstmpllitinterp=1, with the caveat that backticks will now be escaped. This should be used with caution.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.

Affected Assets

golang
go
≤ 1.19.8 · 1.20.0 — 1.20.3

Mitigating Controls

Likely Mitigating Controls AI

Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.

addresses: CWE-94

Makes persistent code injection into loaded programs impossible when the executable image itself resides on hardware-protected read-only media.

addresses: CWE-94

Dynamically generated code can be produced and executed inside the isolated chamber, preventing host compromise from code-injection payloads.

addresses: CWE-94

Validates inputs used in dynamic code generation to block injected directives.

addresses: CWE-94

Directly prevents execution of attacker-supplied code written into data memory regions.

References