CVE-2023-28465

HIGH7.5EPSS 0.74%

HL7 FHIR Partial Path Zip Slip due to bypass of CVE-2023-24057

Published: 3/10/2023Modified: 3/13/2026

Description

### Impact Zip Slip protections implemented in CVE-2023-24057 (GHSA-jqh6-9574-5x22) can be bypassed due a partial path traversal vulnerability. This issue allows a malicious actor to potentially break out of the `TerminologyCacheManager` cache directory. The impact is limited to sibling directories. To demonstrate the vulnerability, consider `userControlled.getCanonicalPath().startsWith("/usr/out")` will allow an attacker to access a directory with a name like `/usr/outnot`. ### Why? To demonstrate this vulnerability, consider `"/usr/outnot".startsWith("/usr/out")`. The check is bypassed although `/outnot` is not under the `/out` directory. It's important to understand that the terminating slash may be removed when using various `String` representations of the `File` object. For example, on Linux, `println(new File("/var"))` will print `/var`, but `println(new File("/var", "/")` will print `/var/`; however, `println(new File("/var", "/").getCanonicalPath())` will print `/var`. ### The Fix Comparing paths with the `java.nio.files.Path#startsWith` will adequately protect againts this vulnerability. For example: `file.getCanonicalFile().toPath().startsWith(BASE_DIRECTORY)` or `file.getCanonicalFile().toPath().startsWith(BASE_DIRECTORY_FILE.getCanonicalFile().toPath())` ### Other Examples - [CVE-2022-31159](https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-java/security/advisories/GHSA-c28r-hw5m-5gv3) - aws/aws-sdk-java - [CVE-2022-23457](https://securitylab.github.com/advisories/GHSL-2022-008_The_OWASP_Enterprise_Security_API/) - ESAPI/esapi-java-legacy ### Vulnerability https://github.com/hapifhir/org.hl7.fhir.core/blob/b0daf666725fa14476d147522155af1e81922aac/org.hl7.fhir.r4b/src/main/java/org/hl7/fhir/r4b/terminologies/TerminologyCacheManager.java#L99-L105 While `getAbsolutePath` will return a normalized path, because the string `path` is not slash terminated, the guard can be bypassed to write the contents of the Zip file to a sibling directory of the cache directory. ### Patches All org.hl7.fhir.core libraries should be updated to 5.6.106. - https://github.com/hapifhir/org.hl7.fhir.core/pull/1162 ### Workarounds Unknown ### References * https://snyk.io/research/zip-slip-vulnerability

Affected packages (6)

CVSS scores

SourceVersionSeverityVector
osvCVSS 3.1HIGH7.5CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

References (9)