Five mainstream AI coding tools exposed for security vulnerabilities, including OpenAI Codex
Security Flaws Found in Five Popular AI Coding Tools, Including OpenAI Codex - The Elec Inc.
According to The Register, security startup Forever Security found a class of vulnerabilities named Embrace (EMbedded BRowser) in five AI development tools—Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Desktop, VS Code and OpenAI Codex—that can lead to remote code execution, file theft and address bar spoofing; the root cause is that the embedded browsers in these tools have system access capabilities that regular browsers do not, bypassing existing security boundaries. Cursor can be triggered into remote code execution via malicious prompts embedded in web pages; it was fixed on October 1 but no official security advisory was issued; GitHub Copilot has address bar spoofing, which GitHub fixed independently via the October 13 v1.1.29 patch; Claude Desktop and VS Code can be made by Web Workers to bypass local file access restrictions and read arbitrary files, and Codex itself has no project folder restriction.
Security researchers found that the embedded browsers of five mainstream AI coding tools can bypass existing security boundaries; the vulnerabilities in Codex and VS Code remained unfixed at the time of the report's publication, and users can use this to check their own exposure.