Directory Traversal Affecting elfinder.netcore package, versions [0,]


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

Exploit Maturity
Mature
EPSS
0.29% (70th percentile)

Do your applications use this vulnerable package?

In a few clicks we can analyze your entire application and see what components are vulnerable in your application, and suggest you quick fixes.

Test your applications

Snyk Learn

Learn about Directory Traversal vulnerabilities in an interactive lesson.

Start learning
  • Snyk IDSNYK-DOTNET-ELFINDERNETCORE-1313838
  • published20 Aug 2021
  • disclosed20 Aug 2021
  • creditTimo Müller

Introduced: 20 Aug 2021

CVE-2021-23428  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-22  (opens in a new tab)
First added by Snyk

How to fix?

There is no fixed version for elFinder.NetCore.

Overview

elFinder.NetCore is a file manager for Web.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Directory Traversal. The Path.Combine(...) method is used to create an absolute file path. Due to missing sanitation of the user input and a missing check of the generated path its possible to escape the Files directory via path traversal

PoC

* git clone https://github.com/gordon-matt/elFinder.NetCore.git
* cd ./elFinder.NetCore/elFinder.NetCore.Web/
* libman restore
* export ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Development
* dotnet run
* go to https://localhost:5001/file-manager
Rightlick on one of the example files and click `Rename`. Rename the file to `../Mountains.jpg`
(This should result in a get request to the URL: https://localhost:5001/el-finder/file-system/connector?cmd=rename&name=..%2Fevil.jpg&target=v1_L01vdW50YWlucy5qcGc1&_=1624303958535)
* Due to the directory traversal vulnerability the file was stored outside of the `Files` directory, and inside the web server root dir `wwwroot`.

Details

A Directory Traversal attack (also known as path traversal) aims to access files and directories that are stored outside the intended folder. By manipulating files with "dot-dot-slash (../)" sequences and its variations, or by using absolute file paths, it may be possible to access arbitrary files and directories stored on file system, including application source code, configuration, and other critical system files.

Directory Traversal vulnerabilities can be generally divided into two types:

  • Information Disclosure: Allows the attacker to gain information about the folder structure or read the contents of sensitive files on the system.

st is a module for serving static files on web pages, and contains a vulnerability of this type. In our example, we will serve files from the public route.

If an attacker requests the following URL from our server, it will in turn leak the sensitive private key of the root user.

curl http://localhost:8080/public/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/root/.ssh/id_rsa

Note %2e is the URL encoded version of . (dot).

  • Writing arbitrary files: Allows the attacker to create or replace existing files. This type of vulnerability is also known as Zip-Slip.

One way to achieve this is by using a malicious zip archive that holds path traversal filenames. When each filename in the zip archive gets concatenated to the target extraction folder, without validation, the final path ends up outside of the target folder. If an executable or a configuration file is overwritten with a file containing malicious code, the problem can turn into an arbitrary code execution issue quite easily.

The following is an example of a zip archive with one benign file and one malicious file. Extracting the malicious file will result in traversing out of the target folder, ending up in /root/.ssh/ overwriting the authorized_keys file:

2018-04-15 22:04:29 .....           19           19  good.txt
2018-04-15 22:04:42 .....           20           20  ../../../../../../root/.ssh/authorized_keys

CVSS Scores

version 3.1