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Path Traversal occurrences in Cran
The R programming language’s default package manager CRAN is affected by a path traversal vulnerability that can lead to server compromise. This vulnerability affects packages installed via the R CMD install cli command or the install.packages() function from the interpreter. Update to version 4.0.3 (2021-01-12, CVE-2020-27637)
Why Path Traversal can be dangerous
Relative Path Confusion means that your web server is configured to serve responses to ambiguous URLs. This configuration can possibly cause confusion about the correct relative path for the URL. It is also an issue of resources, such as images, styles etc., which are specified in the response using relative path, not the absolute URL.
If the web browser permits to parse "cross-content" response, the attacker may be able to fool the web browser into interpreting HTML into other content types, which can then lead to a cross site scripting attack (link do XSS).