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Path Traversal occurrences in Qtiworks
QTIWorks is a software suite for standards-based assessment delivery. Prior to version 1.0-beta15, the QTIWorks Engine allows users to upload QTI content packages as ZIP files. The ZIP handling code does not sufficiently check the paths of files contained within ZIP files, so can insert files into other locations in the filesystem if they are writable by the process running the QTIWorks Engine. In extreme cases, this could allow anonymous users to change files in arbitrary locations in the filesystem. In normal QTIWorks Engine deployments, the impact is somewhat reduced because the default QTIWorks configuration does not enable the public demo functionality, so ZIP files can only be uploaded by users with "instructor" privileges. This vulnerability is fixed in version 1.0-beta15. There are no database configuration changes required when upgrading to this version. No known workarounds for this issue exist. (2022-10-28, CVE-2022-39367)
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).