CVE-2020-36867
Published: 30 October 2025
Description
Adversaries may abuse Unix shell commands and scripts for execution.
Security Summary
CVE-2020-36867 is a command injection vulnerability (CWE-78) affecting Nagios XI versions prior to 5.7.3. The issue resides in the report PDF download/export functionality, where user-supplied values passed to the PDF generation pipeline or the wrapper invoking offline/pdf helper utilities are insufficiently validated or improperly escaped. This allows injection of shell metacharacters or arguments. The vulnerability has a CVSS v3.1 base score of 8.8 (AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H).
An authenticated attacker with the ability to trigger PDF exports can exploit this vulnerability remotely over the network with low complexity and no user interaction required. Successful exploitation enables arbitrary command execution on the underlying system, potentially granting high-impact access to confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Mitigation is addressed in the Nagios XI changelog at https://www.nagios.com/changelog/nagios-xi/, which details fixes in version 5.7.3 and later. Additional details on the vulnerability and remediation are available in the Vulncheck advisory at https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/nagios-xi-command-injection-in-report-pdf-download.
Details
- CWE(s)
Affected Products
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques
Why these techniques?
CVE enables remote exploitation of a public-facing web application (Nagios XI) via authenticated command injection, directly facilitating T1190 and arbitrary Unix shell command execution (T1059.004).