CVE-2024-48919
Published: 22 October 2024
Summary
CVE-2024-48919 is a critical-severity Improper Input Validation (CWE-20) vulnerability. Its CVSS base score is 9.2 (Critical).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Exploitation for Client Execution (T1203); ranked in the top 45.1% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
This vulnerability is AI-related — categorised as Enterprise AI Assistants; in the LLM/Generative AI Risks risk domain; MITRE ATLAS techniques in scope: Direct (AML.T0051.000).
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2024-43133
Vulnerability details
Cursor is a code editor built for programming with AI. Prior to Sep 27, 2024, if a user generated a terminal command via Cursor's Terminal Cmd-K/Ctrl-K feature and if the user explicitly imported a malicious web page into the Terminal…
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Cmd-K prompt, an attacker with control over the referenced web page could have a significant chance of influencing a language model to output arbitrary commands for execution in the user's terminal. This scenario would require the user explicitly opt-in to including the contents of a compromised webpage, and it would require that the attacker display prompt injection text in the the contents of the compromised webpage. A server-side patch to not stream back newlines or control characters was released on September 27, 2024, within two hours of the issue being reported. Additionally, Cursor 0.42 includes client-side mitigations to prevent any newline or control character from being streamed into the terminal directly. It also contains a new setting, `"cursor.terminal.usePreviewBox"`, which, if set to true, streams the response into a preview box whose contents then have to be manually accepted before being inserted into the terminal. This setting is useful if you're working in a shell environment where commands can be executed without pressing enter or any control character. The patch has been applied server-side, so no additional action is needed, even on older versions of Cursor. Separately, Cursor's maintainers also recommend, as best practice, to only include trusted pieces of context in prompts.
- CWE(s)
AI Security AnalysisAI
- AI Category
- Enterprise AI Assistants
- Risk Domain
- LLM/Generative AI Risks
- OWASP Top 10 for LLMs 2025
- None mapped
- Classification Reason
- Cursor is an AI-powered code editor functioning as an enterprise AI assistant for programming, where the vulnerability exploits the AI's language model in generating terminal commands, confirming AI relevance.
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Vulnerability in Cursor AI code editor enables prompt injection via user-imported malicious webpage content, exploiting the client application to generate and facilitate arbitrary terminal command execution.
MITRE ATLAS TechniquesAI
MITRE ATLAS techniques
Affected Assets
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.
Security testing and developer training directly verify and enforce proper input validation, reducing exploitability of injection and malformed-data weaknesses.
Security testing and evaluation at multiple SDLC stages directly detects missing or flawed input validation, with the required remediation process ensuring fixes are applied.
Directly implements checks on information inputs to reject invalid data before processing.
Spam protection mechanisms perform filtering and detection on inbound/outbound messages, directly compensating for missing or weak input validation of unsolicited content.