CVE-2008-3074: Vim Tar.vim

High severity, CVSS 9.3. EPSS: 3.8% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The shellescape function in Vim 7.0 through 7.2, including 7.2a.10, allows user-assisted attackers to execute arbitrary code via the "!" (exclamation point) shell metacharacter in (1) the filename of a tar archive and possibly (2) the filename of the first file in a tar archive, which is not properly handled by the VIM TAR plugin (tar.vim) v.10 through v.22, as demonstrated by the shellescape, tarplugin.v2, tarplugin, and tarplugin.updated test cases. NOTE: this issue reportedly exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2008-2712. NOTE: this issue has the same root cause as CVE-2008-3075. NOTE: due to the complexity of the associated disclosures and the incomplete information related to them, there may be inaccuracies in this CVE description and in external mappings to this identifier.

Affected products

• Vim Tar.vim: version v.10 only; version v.11 only; version v.12 only; version v.13 only; version v.14 only; version v.15 only; …
• Vim Vim: version 7.0 only; version 7.1 only; version 7.1.266 only; version 7.1.314 only; version 7.2 only

Published 2009-02-21. Last modified 2026-06-16.