An attacker can bypass the sandboxing of Nasal scripts and arbitrarily write to any file path that the user has permission to modify at the operating-system level.

It was discovered that FlightGear could write arbitrary files if received a special nasal script. A remote attacker could exploit this with a crafted file to execute arbitrary code.

In FlightGear before version 2017.3.1, Main/logger.cxx in the FGLogger subsystem allows one to overwrite any file via a resource that affects the contents of the global Property Tree.

In FlightGear before 2017.2.1, the FGCommand interface allows overwriting any file the user has write access to, but not with arbitrary data: only with the contents of a FlightGear flightplan (XML). A resource such as a malicious third-party aircraft could exploit this to damage files belonging to the user. Both this issue and CVE-2016-9956 are directory traversal vulnerabilities in Autopilot/routemgr.cxx - this one exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2016-9956.

Last updated 25 August 2025

Multiple buffer overflows in FlightGear 2.6 and earlier and SimGear 2.6 and earlier allow user-assisted remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) and possibly execute arbitrary code via a (1) long string in a rotor tag of an aircraft xml model to the Rotor::getValueforFGSet function in src/FDM/YASim/Rotor.cpp or (2) a crafted UDP packet to the SGSocketUDP::read function in simgear/simgear/simgear/io/sgsocketudp.cxx.

Multiple format string flaws were reported: [1] http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msgid=28957051

in the way Flight Gear, the flight simulator, and SimGear, a simulation library components performed retrieval of various data chunk values from XML aircraft (FlightGear) or scene graph (SimGear) model data files. A remote attacker could provide a specially-crafted XML model file, which once opened by a local, unsuspecting user in FlightGear / in an application linked against SimGear, would lead to that particular executable crash.

CVE Request: [2] http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/04/10/9

CVE Assignment: [3] http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/04/10/13

Upstream patch: None as of right now.