This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)

Path Traversal occurrences in Dotcms

An issue was discovered in the ContentResource API in dotCMS 3.0 through 22.02. Attackers can craft a multipart form request to post a file whose filename is not initially sanitized. This allows directory traversal, in which the file is saved outside of the intended storage location. If anonymous content creation is enabled, this allows an unauthenticated attacker to upload an executable file, such as a .jsp file, that can lead to remote code execution. (2022-07-17, CVE-2022-26352)

dotCMS before 5.2.4 is vulnerable to directory traversal, leading to incorrect access control. It allows an attacker to read or execute files under $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/ROOT/assets (which should be a protected directory). Additionally, attackers can upload temporary files (e.g., .jsp files) into /webapps/ROOT/assets/tmp_upload, which can lead to remote command execution (with the permissions of the user running the dotCMS application). (2020-02-05, CVE-2020-6754)

dotCMS before 5.1.0 has a path traversal vulnerability exploitable by an administrator to create files. The vulnerability is caused by the insecure extraction of a ZIP archive. (2019-05-23, CVE-2019-12309)

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).

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