Zip Slip Vulnerability Affects Thousands of Projects

Yhcrana writes: Considering the video in the story makes it pretty simple, this is not something I would like to have happen. Apparently it is a flaw in the libraries that are being used by Oracle, Apache, and others. The Register reports: "Booby-trapped archive files can exploit vulnerabilities in a swath of software to overwrite documents and data elsewhere on a computer's file system -- and potentially execute malicious code. Specifically, the flaws, dubbed "Zip Slip" by its discoverers at security outfit Snyk, is a path traversal flaw that can potentially be exploited to perform arbitrary code execution attacks. It affects .zip, .bz2, .tar, .xz, .war, .cpio, and .7z archives.

The bugs, according to Snyk, lie in code that unpacks compressed archives, hence the "Zip Slip" title. When software does not properly check and sanitize file names within the archive, attackers can set the destination path for an unpacked file to an existing folder or file elsewhere on a system. When that file is extracted, it will overwrite the existing data in that same path."