GHSA-f7j3-774f-rfhj is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.1) Information Exposure vulnerability in yt-dlp. A fix is available for yt-dlp — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- 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 GHSA-f7j3-774f-rfhj.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
yt-dlpReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Summary
If curl is used an external downloader for yt-dlp, cookies may be leaked to an unintended host upon HTTP redirect or when the host for download fragments differs from their parent manifest's.
This is the equivalent to GHSA-v8mc-9377-rwjj for the curl downloader. The vulnerable behavior is present in yt-dlp released since 2023.09.24.
Details
At the file download stage, the cookies are passed by yt-dlp to the file downloader via --cookie. However, unless these are loaded from a file, this operation does not activate the cookie engine. As a result, curl will send cookies with requests to domains or paths for which the cookies are not scoped.
An example of a potential attack scenario exploiting this vulnerability:
- an attacker has crafted a malicious website with an embedded URL designed to be detected by yt-dlp as a video download. This embedded URL has the domain of a trusted site that the user has loaded cookies for, and conducts an unvalidated redirect to a target URL.
- yt-dlp extracts this URL and calculates the cookies which are then passed to
curl. - the download URL redirects to a server controlled by the attacker, to which
curlforwards the user's sensitive cookie information.
Patches
yt-dlp version 2026.06.09 fixes this issue by doing the following:
- Pass the cookies through stdin via
--cookie -ifcurlis version 7.59 or higher. - Pass the cookies via
--cookie /dev/fd/0if the system supports this device file. - In all other cases create a temporary file, save the cookies and then pass via
--cookie <file>.
Workarounds
It is recommended to upgrade yt-dlp to version 2026.06.09 as soon as possible.
For users who are not able to upgrade:
- Do not use
--downloader curl.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | yt-dlp | ≥ 2023.9.24&&< 2026.6.9 | 2026.6.9pip install --upgrade 'yt-dlp==2026.6.9' |
Affected Products
yt-dlpyt-dlp_projectDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for yt-dlp, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update yt-dlp to 2026.6.9 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-f7j3-774f-rfhj is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Assume what was exposed is already known: rotate any credential, token or key that the affected component could return, restrict the endpoint to callers that genuinely need it, and strip sensitive fields from responses and error output at the boundary rather than relying on the client not to read them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-f7j3-774f-rfhj in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.