RCE via Prompt Injection Into Cursor's Terminal Cmd-K

Summary

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 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.

Timeline

1. Oct 22, 2024, 8:58 PM UTCCVE published
2. Oct 23, 2024, 2:45 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: total

3. Oct 23, 2024, 2:49 PM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• getcursor cursor

  fixed in 0.42

References 1