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Fencer Intel
low 3.9

CVE-2020-5254 json

NetHack hilite_status parsing privilege escalation

published 6y ago modified 4mo ago also EUVD-2020-26464

cvss
3.9
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.1%
EPSS 1.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 66%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In NetHack before 3.6.6, some out-of-bound values for the hilite_status option can be exploited. NetHack 3.6.6 resolves this issue.

Patch / fix

  • nethack nethack 3.6.6
  • nethack Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 3.6.6-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2020-5254

Is CVE-2020-5254 in your stack? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2020-5254 updated

nethack: hilite_status parsing privilege escalation

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

1.14% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 66% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 3.9 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N
NVD 3.1 8.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 6.8 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

Affected products

  • NetHack NetHack

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-125 Out-of-bounds Read
  • CWE-119 Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.