Arbitrary File Write via Archive Extraction (Zip Slip) Affecting mindsdb package, versions [0,]

MindsDB is a MindsDB server, provides server capabilities to mindsdb native python library

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary File Write via Archive Extraction (Zip Slip) due to an unsafe extraction which is performed using the shutil.unpack_archive() function from a remotely retrieved tarball. This can lead to the writing of the extracted files to an unintended location.

1. Use a safer module, like zipfile.

2. Validate the location of the extracted files and discard those with malicious paths such as relative path .. or absolute path such as /etc/password.

3. Perform a checksum verification for the retrieved archive, but hard-coding the hashes may be cumbersome and difficult to manage.

> tar --list -f archive.tar
tar: Removing leading "../../../" from member names
../../../sim4n6.txt

> python3 
Python 3.10.6 (main, Nov  2 2022, 18:53:38) [GCC 11.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import shutil
>>> shutil.unpack_archive("archive.tar")
>>> exit()

> test -f ../../../sim4n6.txt && echo "sim4n6.txt exists"
sim4n6.txt exists

It is exploited using a specially crafted zip archive, that holds path traversal filenames. When exploited, a filename in a malicious archive is concatenated to the target extraction directory, which results in the final path ending up outside of the target folder. For instance, a zip may hold a file with a "../../file.exe" location and thus break out 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 malicous 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

• Vulnerable Code