This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Path Traversal occurrences in K2
** DISPUTED ** The K2 component 2.8.0 for Joomla! has Incorrect Access Control with directory traversal, allowing an attacker to download arbitrary files, as demonstrated by a view=media&task=connector&cmd=file&target=l1_../configuration.php&download=1 request. The specific pathname ../configuration.php should be base64 encoded for a valid attack. NOTE: the vendor disputes this issue because only files under the media-manager path can be downloaded, and the documentation indicates that sensitive information does not belong there. Nonetheless, 2.8.1 has additional blocking of .php downloads. (2018-02-28, CVE-2018-7482)
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).