CVE-2022-2068
CRITICALCVE-2022-2068 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) OS Command Injection vulnerability. EPSS puts its 30-day exploitation probability at 95.4% (100th percentile). O3 Security confirms whether CVE-2022-2068 is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
The c_rehash script allows command injection
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2022-2068.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2022-2068 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE sits: patch-first territory.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 0 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the ≥ 90% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Description
In addition to the c_rehash shell command injection identified in CVE-2022-1292, further circumstances where the c_rehash script does not properly sanitise shell metacharacters to prevent command injection were found by code review. When the CVE-2022-1292 was fixed it was not discovered that there are other places in the script where the file names of certificates being hashed were possibly passed to a command executed through the shell. This script is distributed by some operating systems in a manner where it is automatically executed. On such operating systems, an attacker could execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the script. Use of the c_rehash script is considered obsolete and should be replaced by the OpenSSL rehash command line tool. Fixed in OpenSSL 3.0.4 (Affected 3.0.0,3.0.1,3.0.2,3.0.3). Fixed in OpenSSL 1.1.1p (Affected 1.1.1-1.1.1o). Fixed in OpenSSL 1.0.2zf (Affected 1.0.2-1.0.2ze).
Detection & mitigation playbook
VulnerabilityDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for the affected component. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Remediation status
No patched version of the affected component has shipped for CVE-2022-2068 yet. Where your build allows, override or pin the dependency away from the vulnerable range, and apply any maintainer-recommended mitigation.
Mitigate without a patch
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 pinpoints whether CVE-2022-2068 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to CVE-2022-2068. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses a system-wide store of trusted certificates bundled in a single file and updated via `update-ca-trust`. The `c_rehash` script is not included in the default installation on any supported RHEL version and is never executed automatically. For these reasons, this flaw has been rated as…
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2022-2068 in your dependencies?
O3 detects CVE-2022-2068 across dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.