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Path Traversal occurrences in Galaxy
Galaxy is an open-source platform for data analysis. An arbitrary file read exists in Galaxy 22.01 and Galaxy 22.05 due to the switch to Gunicorn, which can be used to read any file accessible to the operating system user under which Galaxy is running. This vulnerability affects Galaxy 22.01 and higher, after the switch to gunicorn, which serve static contents directly. Additionally, the vulnerability is mitigated when using Nginx or Apache to serve /static/* contents, instead of Galaxy's internal middleware. This issue has been patched in commit `e5e6bda4f` and will be included in future releases. Users are advised to manually patch their installations. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability. (2022-12-06, CVE-2022-23470)
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).