Answer in brief
CVE-2026-40261 records a High severity (CVSS 8.8) vulnerability in Composer has Command Injection via Malicious Perforce Reference. The current sources do not mark it as known exploited. The current feed maps composer/composer (generic). Check affected ranges and fixed versions before updating.
Analysis pending evidence review
HOL Guard separates source facts from reviewed analysis. See the methodology.
CVSS is 8.8. The current sources do not mark it as known exploited. Treat this as a source-backed prioritization signal, not a statement about your environment.
Analysis status
Analysis pending evidence review
Factual feed record only; HOL analysis is not approved for indexing. Read the methodology.
The current feed maps composer/composer (generic). Check affected ranges and fixed versions before updating.
| Package | Affected range | Fixed version |
|---|---|---|
| composer/composergeneric | >=2.3.0 <2.9.6 || >=1.0.0 <2.2.27 | 2.9.6, 2.2.27 |
Published upstream
Apr 15, 2026
Evidence: source:cvelist:source_dates:source-dates:recordSource modified
Jul 15, 2026
Evidence: source:cvelist:source_dates:source-dates:recordFirst seen by HOL
Jul 15, 2026
Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. Versions 1.0 through 2.2.26 and 2.3 through 2.9.5 contain a command injection vulnerability in the Perforce::syncCodeBase() method, which appends the $sourceReference parameter to a shell command without proper escaping, and additionally in the Perforce::generateP4Command() method as in GHSA-wg36-wvj6-r67p / CVE-2026-40176, which interpolates user-supplied Perforce connection parameters (port, user, client) from the source url field without proper escaping. An attacker can inject arbitrary commands through crafted source reference or source url values containing shell metacharacters, even if Perforce is not installed. Unlike CVE-2026-40176, the source reference and url are provided as part of package metadata, meaning any compromised or malicious Composer repository can serve package metadata declaring perforce as a source type with malicious values. This vulnerability is exploitable when installing or updating dependencies from source, including the default behavior when installing dev-prefixed versions. This issue has been fixed in Composer 2.2.27 (2.2 LTS) and 2.9.6 (mainline). If developers are unable to immediately update, they can avoid installing dependencies from source by using --prefer-dist or the preferred-install: dist config setting, and only use trusted Composer repositories as a workaround.
Quoted source text, attributed separately from HOL analysis.