Medium severity · published May 25, 2026
CVE-2026-5223
Crates in third party registries can override the cached source of other crates
5.3
CVSS
0.3%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
Cargo incorrectly handled symlinks inside of crate tarballs downloaded from third-party registries, allowing a malicious crate to override the source code of another crate from the same registry. The severity of the vulnerability is **medium** for users of third-party registries. Users of crates.io are **not affected**, as crates.io forbids uploading crates containing any symlink.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
Low
Availability
None
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.3% · higher than 22% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
CA
Cargo · Rust Project
1.0.0 before 1.96.0 · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-5223
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-5223
Mitigation
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/05/25/cve-2026-5223/
Issue Tracking
https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/17031
Mailing List
https://groups.google.com/g/rustlang-security-announcements/c/IB74S7Yksg8