yt-dlp: Downstream command injection via improper sanitization of yt-dlp --write-link output

Summary

If the --write-link, --write-url-link or --write-desktop-link options are used with yt-dlp, it may produce output that can lead to downstream remote code execution. An attacker can craft a malicious metadata payload to achieve arbitrary command injection in the .url and .desktop shortcut files written by yt-dlp. This allows for malicious shell commands or malicious remote executables to run on the user's system if the user executes the generated .url or .desktop files.

Details

The expected result of yt-dlp's --write-link, --write-url-link and --write-desktop-link options is to write a shortcut file that points to the webpage URL for the content downloaded by yt-dlp. The --write-url-link option writes a .url shortcut file for Windows, the --write-desktop-link option writes a .desktop shortcut file for Linux, and the --write-link option may write a .url file or a .desktop file depending on the user's platform.

There are two known scenarios where a remote attacker could serve a malicious metadata payload to exploit yt-dlp's improper validation/sanitization of its shortcut output and achieve arbitrary code execution if the user later opens these files.

Scenario 1: file:// URI injection in Windows .url shortcut

If a yt-dlp user passes the --write-link or --write-url-link option to generate a Windows .url file, the URL written to the shortcut file is sourced from the downloaded media's metadata--specifically, its webpage_url value. This value is commonly a normalized version of the input URL passed to yt-dlp by the user, but in some cases it may be extracted from untrusted web input. Validation of this webpage_url value is performed if it is fed back to yt-dlp as an input URL (e.g. via the --load-info-json option), but no validation is performed before it is output to a .url shortcut file.

This lack of validation is exploitable by a remote attacker who crafts a malicious metadata payload such that the resulting webpage_url value is a file:// URI. A malicious file URI could point to a remote executable, e.g. file://example.org/pwned.exe. If a Windows user double-clicks a .url file that points to this webpage_url, Windows will execute the malicious remote executable on the user's system.

Scenario 2: Shell command injection in Linux .desktop shortcut

The Linux .desktop file format is a more versatile than the Windows .url file format. It is defined by the freedesktop.org "desktop entry" file specification, and supports multiple types of shortcuts: a Link type for URLs, a Directory type for filesystem folders, and an Application type for programs or shell commands. yt-dlp outputs a desktop entry file of the Link type, using the template below:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=%(filename)s
Type=Link
URL=%(url)s
Icon=text-html

The keys under the [Desktop Entry] group are separated by newlines, and the type of desktop entry is set by the value paired to the Type key.

If a yt-dlp user passes the --write-link or --write-desktop-link option to generate a desktop entry file, in addition to the webpage_url value there is a filename value that is written to the shortcut file. By default, yt-dlp will sanitize the filename value: this sanitization includes replacing newlines with spaces and removing other control characters. However, the --no-windows-filenames option was modified in yt-dlp version 2024.12.23 to disable this default filename sanitization when used.

If the user passes --write-link or --write-desktop-link together with --no-windows-filenames to yt-dlp, an unsanitized filename value can be written to the resulting desktop entry file. A remote attacker can exploit this lack of sanitization by crafting a malicious metadata payload such that the resulting filename value contains newline characters, which can be used to inject arbitrary groups, keys and values into the desktop entry output. Doing so allows the attacker to change the Type of the desktop entry to Application and achieve shell command injection.

For example, an attacker-controlled website could serve a webpage with this maliciously crafted JSON-LD data:

<html>
<script type="application/ld+json">{
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "VideoObject",
    "name":"Stream\nType=Application\nExec=sh -c &quot;touch /tmp/pwned&quot;\n\n[newgroup]\nName=endtitle",
    "contentUrl": "https://example.org/video.mp4"
}</script>
</html>

Then, a yt-dlp user could try to download the legitimate video content from the page by running the following command:

yt-dlp --write-desktop-link --no-windows-filenames "https://example.org/123"

Which would result in a desktop entry file containing a malicious shell command:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Stream
Type=Application
Exec=sh -c "touch /tmp/pwned"

[newgroup]
Name=endtitle [123]
Type=Link
URL=%(url)s
Icon=text-html

If a user on a Linux desktop environment executes the generated .desktop file, the malicious shell command would run on the user's system. (In the above example, a /tmp/pwned file would be created in the user's filesystem.)

Patches

yt-dlp version 2026.07.04 fixes this issue by validating the URL scheme before any shortcut file is written, and by properly sanitizing all desktop entry values written to the .desktop file generated from using the --write-desktop-link or --write-link options. (Most notably: newline characters are replaced by their proper escape sequence per the freedesktop.org desktop entry specification.)

Workarounds

It is recommended to upgrade yt-dlp to version 2026.07.04 as soon as possible.

Users who are not able to upgrade should avoid using any of the --write-link, --write-url-link or --write-desktop-link options.