Directory Traversal Affecting github.com/rclone/rclone/cmd/serve/restic package, versions <1.74.4


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

Exploit Maturity
Proof of Concept
EPSS
0.5% (41st percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-GOLANG-GITHUBCOMRCLONERCLONECMDSERVERESTIC-18017907
  • published19 Jul 2026
  • disclosed15 Jul 2026
  • credit5ud0er

Introduced: 15 Jul 2026

CVE-2026-59733  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-22  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade github.com/rclone/rclone/cmd/serve/restic to version 1.74.4 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Directory Traversal allowing authorization bypass in the checkPrivate() and WithRemote() middleware in cmd/serve/restic/restic.go, where checkPrivate() authorizes on the routed {userID} segment while WithRemote() builds the backend object key from the raw, uncanonicalized URL path without rejecting ... A user with valid credentials for their own restic account can read, overwrite, or delete another tenant's repository objects by requesting a path such as /{attacker}/../{victim}/config, which passes the ownership check on the first segment but resolves to the victim's path on backends that collapse ... Exploitation requires rclone serve restic running with --private-repos and HTTP Basic authentication, plus a backend that applies POSIX path canonicalization such as memory, sftp, or ftp, whereas the local backend neutralizes the traversal and --append-only blocks the overwrite and delete impacts.

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 Base Scores

version 4.0
version 3.1