CVE-2017-17562: Embedthis GoAhead Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

High severity, CVSS 8.1. Actively exploited: in CISA KEV since 2021-12-10. EPSS: 96.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Embedthis GoAhead before 3.6.5 allows remote code execution if CGI is enabled and a CGI program is dynamically linked. This is a result of initializing the environment of forked CGI scripts using untrusted HTTP request parameters in the cgiHandler function in cgi.c. When combined with the glibc dynamic linker, this behaviour can be abused for remote code execution using special parameter names such as LD_PRELOAD. An attacker can POST their shared object payload in the body of the request, and reference it using /proc/self/fd/0.

Affected products

• Embedthis GoAhead: before 3.6.5 (fixed in 3.6.5)
• Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager: version 3.0 only; version 4.0 only

Published 2017-12-12. Last modified 2026-06-17.