Vulnerabilities / CVE-2023-38690

critical

CVE-2023-38690

matrix-appservice-irc IRC command injection via admin commands containing newlines

Published Modified CWE 20, 77
In the Trivy database since at least 24 Oct 2026, 07:11 UTCWhen it arrived before that build is not recorded.

Severity by source

NVD9.8CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
GHSA5.0CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:L/A:N

Trivy's own label is CRITICAL. Rated critical by NVD. Rated lower by GHSA (medium).

Description

matrix-appservice-irc is a Node.js IRC bridge for Matrix. Prior to version 1.0.1, it is possible to craft a command with newlines which would not be properly parsed. This would mean you could pass a string of commands as a channel name, which would then be run by the IRC bridge bot. Versions 1.0.1 and above are patched. There are no robust workarounds to the bug. One may disable dynamic channels in the config to disable the most common execution method but others may exist.

Affected packages and fixed versions

SourcePackageFixed in
npm::GitHub Security Advisory npmmatrix-appservice-irc1.0.1

References

Vulnerability data compiled from the Trivy vulnerability database (trivy-db, Aqua Security, Apache License 2.0), which aggregates third-party advisories. CVE records are published by The MITRE Corporation under the CVE Terms of Use; CVE is a trademark of MITRE. This product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD. Severity, titles and advisory data from the GitHub Advisory Database (CC BY 4.0), Red Hat security data (CC BY 4.0) and the other sources linked on each entry. Entries may be summarised or re-formatted; the linked original is the authoritative record.