Privilege escalation in Zen-Browser Desktop

CVE-2026-57501

Zen is a firefox-based browser. Prior to 1.21.5b, Zen's glance and split-view context-menu actions, Open link in glance and Split link in new tab, load a page-controlled link URL with the System principal instead of the originating page's principal, allowing a malicious web page to place a link to a file URL that can load with System privileges when opened through either context-menu item and bypass the content-to-file security check that blocks an ordinary click. This issue is fixed in version 1.21.5b.

Published · last modified .

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.005 (41.3th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 41st percentile — 41.3% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-57501: held from 0.005 to 0.005.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.005 · newest: 0.005 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References