Directory Traversal Affecting winter/wn-system-module package, versions <1.2.13


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-PHP-WINTERWNSYSTEMMODULE-19427356
  • published29 Aug 2026
  • disclosed20 Aug 2026
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 20 Aug 2026

New CVE NOT AVAILABLE CWE-22  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade winter/wn-system-module to version 1.2.13 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Directory Traversal via the processing of =include and =require directives in JavaScript asset compilation. An attacker can disclose arbitrary files readable by the PHP process by crafting directives that escape the intended asset directory, causing sensitive files to be inlined and served publicly. This is only exploitable if the attacker has an authenticated backend account with the cms.manage_assets permission.

Workaround

This vulnerability can be mitigated by manually applying the referenced patches or by removing the cms.manage_assets permission from any role not held by a fully trusted administrator or developer, and auditing existing theme .js assets for unsafe directives.

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