CVE-2008-5983: Canonical Ubuntu Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 6.9. EPSS: 0.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Untrusted search path vulnerability in the PySys_SetArgv API function in Python 2.6 and earlier, and possibly later versions, prepends an empty string to sys.path when the argv[0] argument does not contain a path separator, which might allow local users to execute arbitrary code via a Trojan horse Python file in the current working directory.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: version 8.04 only; version 10.04 only; version 11.04 only; version 11.10 only
• Fedoraproject Fedora: version 13 only
• Python Python: before 2.6.6 (fixed in 2.6.6); from 3.1.0, before 3.1.3 (fixed in 3.1.3)

Published 2009-01-28. Last modified 2026-06-16.