This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Path Traversal occurrences in Yum-utils
A directory traversal issue was found in reposync, a part of yum-utils, where reposync fails to sanitize paths in remote repository configuration files. If an attacker controls a repository, they may be able to copy files outside of the destination directory on the targeted system via path traversal. If reposync is running with heightened privileges on a targeted system, this flaw could potentially result in system compromise via the overwriting of critical system files. Version 1.1.31 and older are believed to be affected. (2018-08-01, CVE-2018-10897)
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).