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Path Traversal occurrences in Ios
Multiple vulnerabilities in the Cisco IOx application hosting environment on multiple Cisco platforms could allow an attacker to inject arbitrary commands into the underlying host operating system, execute arbitrary code on the underlying host operating system, install applications without being authenticated, or conduct a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack against a user of the affected software. For more information about these vulnerabilities, see the Details section of this advisory. (2022-04-15, CVE-2022-20727)
A vulnerability in the Cisco IOx application hosting environment of multiple Cisco platforms could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to conduct directory traversal attacks and read and write files on the underlying operating system or host system. This vulnerability occurs because the device does not properly validate URIs in IOx API requests. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted API request that contains directory traversal character sequences to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to read or write arbitrary files on the underlying operating system. (2021-03-24, CVE-2021-1385)
A Path Traversal vulnerability in the diagnostic shell for Cisco IOS and IOS XE Software could allow an authenticated, local attacker to use certain diagnostic shell commands that can overwrite system files. These system files may be sensitive and should not be able to be overwritten by a user of the diagnostic shell. The vulnerability is due to lack of proper input validation for certain diagnostic shell commands. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating to the device, entering the diagnostic shell, and providing crafted user input to commands at the local diagnostic shell CLI. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to overwrite system files that should be restricted. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCvg41950. (2018-02-08, CVE-2018-0123)
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).