This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Path Traversal occurrences in James
Fix of CVE-2021-40525 do not prepend delimiters upon valid directory validations. Affected implementations include: - maildir mailbox store - Sieve file repository This enables a user to access other users data stores (limited to user names being prefixed by the value of the username being used). (2022-02-07, CVE-2022-22931)
Apache James ManagedSieve implementation alongside with the file storage for sieve scripts is vulnerable to path traversal, allowing reading and writing any file. This vulnerability had been patched in Apache James 3.6.1 and higher. We recommend the upgrade. Distributed and Cassandra based products are also not impacted. (2022-01-04, CVE-2021-40525)
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).