This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Path Traversal occurrences in Sourcefire Defense Center
A vulnerability in the web-based management interface of Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC) Software could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to perform a directory traversal attack on an affected device. The attacker would require valid device credentials. The vulnerability is due to insufficient input validation of the HTTPS URL by the web-based management interface. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTPS 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 device. (2021-10-27, CVE-2021-34762)
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).