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Path Traversal occurrences in Node-red
Node-Red is a low-code programming for event-driven applications built using nodejs. Node-RED 1.2.7 and earlier has a vulnerability which allows arbitrary path traversal via the Projects API. If the Projects feature is enabled, a user with `projects.read` permission is able to access any file via the Projects API. The issue has been patched in Node-RED 1.2.8. The vulnerability applies only to the Projects feature which is not enabled by default in Node-RED. The primary workaround is not give untrusted users read access to the Node-RED editor. (2021-02-26, CVE-2021-21298)
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).