Overview
We are addressing a significant vulnerability that affects Roo Code, an AI-powered autonomous coding agent. The vulnerability, officially assigned as CVE-2025-53098, has the potential to compromise the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of the system. An attacker with specific access permissions can craft a prompt that manipulates Roo Code into writing harmful commands into a configuration file. This can lead to the execution of arbitrary commands that could compromise the system or lead to data leakage. The severity of this vulnerability lies in its potential for exploitation, emphasizing the need for immediate attention and mitigation.
Vulnerability Summary
CVE ID: CVE-2025-53098
Severity: Moderate (CVSS: 8.1)
Attack Vector: Local
Privileges Required: Low
User Interaction: Required
Impact: Potential system compromise or data leakage
Affected Products
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Product | Affected Versions
Roo Code | Prior to 3.20.3
How the Exploit Works
The exploit takes advantage of the MCP (Master Control Program) configuration format’s ability to execute arbitrary commands in Roo Code. An attacker with certain permissions, for instance through a prompt injection attack, can craft a prompt that makes the agent write a harmful command into the MCP configuration file. If the user has enabled the auto-approving file writes within the project, this could lead to arbitrary command execution, compromising the system or causing data leakage.
Conceptual Example Code
Below is a conceptual example of how the vulnerability might be exploited. This is a pseudocode example that illustrates the crafting of a malicious prompt:
# Attacker gains access to submit prompts to the agent
attacker_access = gain_access(agent)
# Craft a prompt that writes malicious command into the MCP configuration file
malicious_prompt = craft_prompt('write', '.roo/mcp.json', 'malicious_command')
# Submit the crafted prompt to the agent
submit_prompt(attacker_access, malicious_prompt)Please note that this is a simplified example and actual exploitation would likely involve more complex and specific commands, taking into account the specific configuration and setup of the targeted system.