Compliance Impact

The vulnerability allows unauthenticated remote code execution, which can lead to high confidentiality, integrity, and availability losses on affected systems.

Such impacts could potentially result in non-compliance with common standards and regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, which require protection of sensitive data and system integrity.

However, the provided information does not explicitly discuss or analyze the direct effects of this vulnerability on compliance with these standards.

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Mitigation Strategies

To mitigate this vulnerability immediately, users should update Ghidra to version 12.1 or later, where the unsafe deserialization issue has been fixed.

Additional mitigation involves applying a client-side ObjectInputFilter or patching the Jython library to add a readResolve guard to prevent the deserialization attack.

Until the update is applied, users should avoid opening untrusted or suspicious Ghidra project files, especially those received via email attachments, cloud storage, or file-sharing platforms.

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Executive Summary

CVE-2026-52751 is a high-severity vulnerability in Ghidra, a software reverse engineering tool developed by the NSA. It exists in versions before 12.1 and involves unsafe deserialization in the client-side Shared-Project RMI connection code.

An attacker can craft a malicious Ghidra project file containing a ghidra:// URL. When a victim opens this file via File → Open Project, the client deserializes untrusted objects using a gadget chain in the bundled Jython 2.7.4 library. This deserialization leads to arbitrary command execution on the victim's machine without requiring authentication.

The vulnerability arises because the client does not apply an ObjectInputFilter to restrict deserialization, unlike the server which enforces a strict allow-list filter. The exploit uses Python's eval function and ultimately invokes Runtime.getRuntime().exec(), enabling remote code execution.

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Impact Analysis

This vulnerability allows unauthenticated remote code execution on a victim's workstation running vulnerable versions of Ghidra.

• Attackers can execute arbitrary commands on the victim's machine.
• Confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the affected system can be severely compromised.
• The attack requires only that the victim opens a malicious project file, which can be delivered via email, cloud storage, or file-sharing platforms.

Overall, this can lead to full system compromise, data theft, or disruption of services.

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Detection Guidance

This vulnerability can be detected by monitoring for attempts to open malicious Ghidra project files containing crafted ghidra:// URLs that trigger unsafe deserialization. Since the exploit involves deserialization of untrusted objects via the client-side Shared-Project RMI connection, detection may focus on identifying suspicious project file openings or unusual RMI activity.

There are no specific commands provided in the available resources to detect this vulnerability directly on a network or system.

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