Laravel Deserialization of Untrusted Data Vulnerability
CVE-2018-15133 · Laravel Laravel Framework · Published 2018-08-09
How bad would it be?
8.1 out of 10
CVSS rates it high.
How likely is it to be used?
77%
Estimated chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, among the top 1% of all scored flaws (EPSS, 2026-10-29).
Is it already being used?
Yes
CISA has seen it exploited in real attacks. For US government agencies the fix is deadline passed 997 days ago (2024-02-06).
What CISA says to do
Apply mitigations per vendor instructions or discontinue use of the product if mitigations are unavailable.
Laravel Framework contains a deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability, allowing for remote command execution. This vulnerability may only be exploited if a malicious user has accessed the application encryption key (APP_KEY environment variable).
In Laravel Framework through 5.5.40 and 5.6.x through 5.6.29, remote code execution might occur as a result of an unserialize call on a potentially untrusted X-XSRF-TOKEN value. This involves the decrypt method in Illuminate/Encryption/Encrypter.php and PendingBroadcast in gadgetchains/Laravel/RCE/3/chain.php in phpggc. The attacker must know the application key, which normally would never occur, but could happen if the attacker previously had privileged access or successfully accomplished a previous attack.
Understand the kind of weakness behind this flaw. These resources teach the weakness, rather than reproduce this specific CVE. Follow the vendor's advice above to fix the affected product.
Insecure deserialization
Rebuilding objects from untrusted saved data can trigger unintended behaviour.
CWE is a catalogue of weakness types. Labels come from the sources shown and can differ or change. Resource matches reviewed 16 October 2026.
On SentryFeed
No story in the last 14 days has mentioned it.
Exploited flaws from CISA's KEV catalogue. Chance of exploitation from EPSS by FIRST. Descriptions and scores from the NVD. This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD.