Cursor is vulnerable to RCE via .code-workspace files using Prompt Injection

Vulnerability Description

Cursor is a code editor built for programming with AI. Versions 1.6 and below are vulnerable to Remote Code Execution (RCE) attacks through Visual Studio Code Workspaces. Workspaces allow users to open more than a single folder and save specific settings (pretty similar to .vscode/settings.json) for the folders / project. An untitled workspace is automatically created by VS Code (untitled.code-workspace), which contains all the folders and workspace settings from the user's current session, opening up an entire new attack vector if the user has a .code-workspace file in path (either untitled created automatically or a saved one). If an attacker is able to hijack the chat context of the victim (such as via a compromised MCP server), they can use prompt injection to make the Cursor Agent write into this file and modify the workspace. This leads to a bypass of CVE-2025-54130 which can lead to RCE by writing to the settings section. This issue is fixed in version 1.7.

References

• https://github.com/cursor/cursor/security/advisories/GHSA-xg6w-rmh5-r77r