CVE-2026-41526

KCoreAddons provides classes built on top of QtCore to perform various tasks such as manipulating mime types, autosaving files, creating backup files, generating random sequences, performing text manipulations such as macro replacement, accessing user information and many more.

Security Fix(es):

In KDE KCoreAddons before 6.25, KShell::quoteArgs is intended to safely quote arguments so that they can be passed to a shell command. This parsing does not adequately handle metacharacters, leading to an escape from the shell. All applications relying on this method in a security-critical path to handle user input are affected and could be exploited. In particular, because sendInput() sends a string to a terminal, a control character such as \x01 can be used during injection.(CVE-2026-41526)

KCoreAddons provides classes built on top of QtCore to perform various tasks such as manipulating mime types, autosaving files, creating backup files, generating random sequences, performing text manipulations such as macro replacement, accessing user information and many more.

Security Fix(es):

In KDE KCoreAddons before 6.25, KShell::quoteArgs is intended to safely quote arguments so that they can be passed to a shell command. This parsing does not adequately handle metacharacters, leading to an escape from the shell. All applications relying on this method in a security-critical path to handle user input are affected and could be exploited. In particular, because sendInput() sends a string to a terminal, a control character such as \x01 can be used during injection.(CVE-2026-41526)

KCoreAddons provides classes built on top of QtCore to perform various tasks such as manipulating mime types, autosaving files, creating backup files, generating random sequences, performing text manipulations such as macro replacement, accessing user information and many more.

Security Fix(es):

In KDE KCoreAddons before 6.25, KShell::quoteArgs is intended to safely quote arguments so that they can be passed to a shell command. This parsing does not adequately handle metacharacters, leading to an escape from the shell. All applications relying on this method in a security-critical path to handle user input are affected and could be exploited. In particular, because sendInput() sends a string to a terminal, a control character such as \x01 can be used during injection.(CVE-2026-41526)

In KDE KCoreAddons before 6.25, KShell::quoteArgs is intended to safely quote arguments so that they can be passed to a shell command. This parsing does not adequately handle metacharacters, leading to an escape from the shell. All applications relying on this method in a security-critical path to handle user input are affected and could be exploited. In particular, because sendInput() sends a string to a terminal, a control character such as \x01 can be used during injection.

In KDE KCoreAddons before 6.25, KShell::quoteArgs is intended to safely quote arguments so that they can be passed to a shell command. This parsing does not adequately handle metacharacters, leading to an escape from the shell. All applications relying on this method in a security-critical path to handle user input are affected and could be exploited. In particular, because sendInput() sends a string to a terminal, a control character such as \x01 can be used during injection.

This update for kf6-kcoreaddons fixes the following issues:

Changes in kf6-kcoreaddons:

• CVE-2026-41526: Fixed arbitrary code execution via improper shell argument quoting (boo#1263441)

It was discovered that KCoreAddons incorrectly handled shell argument quoting in KShell::quoteArgs. The parsing did not adequately handle shell metacharacters, which could lead to a shell escape. An attacker could possibly use this issue to execute arbitrary commands in applications that relied on this method to handle user input.