CVE-2023-24809 — NetHack is a single player dungeon exploration game

NetHack is a single player dungeon exploration game. Starting with version 3.6.2 and prior to version 3.6.7, illegal input to the "C" (call) command can cause a buffer overflow and crash the NetHack process. This vulnerability may be a security issue for systems that ha

01What is this vulnerability?

NetHack is a single player dungeon exploration game. Starting with version 3.6.2 and prior to version 3.6.7, illegal input to the "C" (call) command can cause a buffer overflow and crash the NetHack process. This vulnerability may be a security issue for systems that have NetHack installed suid/sgid and for shared systems. For all systems, it may result in a process crash. This issue is resolved…

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
NetHack	NetHack	>= 3.6.2, < 3.6.7

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2023-02-17T19:41:24.248Z
• Last modified: 2025-03-10T21:09:40.920Z

09References

• github.com — https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/security/advisories/GHSA-2cqv-5w4v-mgch
• nethack.org — https://nethack.org/security/CVE-2023-24809.html