Directory Traversal Affecting microsoft.openapi.kiota.builder package, versions [,1.32.5)

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Directory Traversal via unvalidated workspace outputPath handling in WorkspaceConfigurationStorageService and BaseApiConsumerConfiguration during kiota client generate and kiota plugin generate. An attacker can make Kiota write generated client or plugin files outside the repository by supplying a poisoned .kiota/workspace.json with an absolute path, rooted path, or .. traversal in a consumer’s outputPath. This allows a malicious repository or pull request to overwrite files on a developer's or CI host, breaking local builds and potentially dropping files in attacker-chosen locations on the filesystem.

Notes

• Confirmed on Kiota 1.32.4 with the preview workspace flow: the vulnerable path is the documented team-repo workflow where developers or CI run kiota client generate / kiota plugin generate against a committed .kiota/workspace.json.
• The poisoned outputPath comes from workspace config rather than the OpenAPI description, so repositories or pull requests that only edit .kiota/workspace.json can trigger the write.

Workarounds

• Review committed .kiota/workspace.json files and remove any clients[*].outputPath or plugins[*].outputPath values that are absolute, rooted, or use .. traversal; keep them as relative subdirectories of the workspace to prevent Kiota from writing generated files outside the repository.

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

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