CVE-2024-5742: GNU Nano

Medium severity, CVSS 6.7. EPSS: 0.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

A vulnerability was found in GNU Nano that allows a possible privilege escalation through an insecure temporary file. If Nano is killed while editing, a file it saves to an emergency file with the permissions of the running user provides a window of opportunity for attackers to escalate privileges through a malicious symlink.

Affected products

• GNU Nano: from 2.2.0, before 8.0 (fixed in 8.0)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: version 6.0 only; version 7.0 only; version 8.0 only; version 9.0 only

Published 2024-06-12. Last modified 2026-06-17.