Directory Traversal Affecting litellm package, versions [,1.83.7)

litellm is a Library to easily interface with LLM API providers

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Directory Traversal via path traversal in the skill archive extraction logic in SkillPromptInjectionHandler and SkillsSandboxExecutor. An authenticated user with access to the Skills API, or a key allowed to call /v1/skills, anthropic_routes, or llm_api_routes, can upload a crafted ZIP archive with ../ or absolute-path entries to make extraction write files outside the intended staging directory. That lets the attacker overwrite files on the host, which can corrupt the deployment or place executable content in writable locations and lead to code execution depending on the runtime environment and filesystem permissions.

Notes

• The archive extraction path handling is only exercised when a skill ZIP is processed for execution, so deployments that expose Skills upload/processing through /v1/skills, anthropic_routes, or llm_api_routes are the relevant exposure points; ordinary LiteLLM use without those routes is not in scope.
• The write primitive depends on the staging directory being used to materialize extracted files on disk, so impact is constrained by the runtime’s filesystem permissions and whatever writable locations the LiteLLM process can reach.

Workarounds

• Block POST /v1/skills at your reverse proxy or API gateway to prevent uploading crafted skill archives that can trigger the path traversal write.
• Restrict Skills API access to trusted users only to limit who can submit malicious ZIP archives through /v1/skills, anthropic_routes, or llm_api_routes.

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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