This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Path Traversal occurrences in Thinvnc
ThinVNC 1.0b1 is vulnerable to arbitrary file read, which leads to a compromise of the VNC server. The vulnerability exists even when authentication is turned on during the deployment of the VNC server. The password for authentication is stored in cleartext in a file that can be read via a ../../ThinVnc.ini directory traversal attack vector. (2019-10-16, CVE-2019-17662)
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).