Relative Path Traversal Affecting std/path/filepath package, versions <1.20.12>=1.21.0 <1.21.5

std/path/filepath is a Go standard library package std/path/filepath

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Relative Path Traversal.

Go Vulnerability Report:
The filepath package does not recognize paths with a ??\ prefix as special.On Windows, a path beginning with ??\ is a Root Local Device path equivalent to a path beginning with \?. Paths with a ??\ prefix may be used to access arbitrary locations on the system. For example, the path ??\c:\x is equivalent to the more common path c:\x.Before fix, Clean could convert a rooted path such as \a..??\b into the root local device path ??\b. Clean will now convert this to .??\b.Similarly, Join(, ??, b) could convert a seemingly innocent sequence of path elements into the root local device path ??\b. Join will now convert this to .??\b.In addition, with fix, IsAbs now correctly reports paths beginning with ??\ as absolute, and VolumeName correctly reports the ??\ prefix as a volume name.UPDATE: Go 1.20.11 and Go 1.21.4 inadvertently changed the definition of the volume name in Windows paths starting with ?, resulting in filepath.Clean(?\c:) returning ?\c: rather than ?\c:\ (among other effects). The previous behavior has been restored.

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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