Impact

Hugo depends on Go's os/exec for certain features, e.g. for rendering of Pandoc documents if these binaries are found in the system %PATH% on Windows. However, if a malicious file with the same name (exe or bat) is found in the current working directory at the time of running hugo, the malicious command will be invoked instead of the system one.

Windows users who run hugo inside untrusted Hugo sites are affected.

Patches

Users should upgrade to Hugo v0.79.1.

References

• GHSA-8j34-9876-pvfq
• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-26284
• golang/go#38736