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  1. Archive/Backup/Bin
  2. Port Swigger (Web Penetration Testing)

Path Traversal (Directory Traversal)

This vulnerability enables an attacker to read arbitrary files on the server that is running an application.

The sequence ../ is valid within a file path, and means to step up one level in the directory structure.

On Windows, both ../ and *..* are valid directory traversal sequences.

Files to check for in Linux: /etc/passwd

Files to check for in Windows: \windows\win.ini

Imagine a shopping application that displays images of items for sale. This might load an image using the following HTML

img src="/loadImage?filename=218.png"

The loadImage URL takes a filename parameter and returns the contents of the specified file. The image files are stored on disk in the location /var/www/images/.

Using

https://insecure-website.com/loadImage?filename=../../../etc/passwd

will provide an attacker with the passwd file.

  1. The most effective way to prevent path traversal vulnerabilities is to avoid passing user-supplied input to filesystem APIs altogether.

  2. Validate the user input before processing it. Ideally, compare the user input with a whitelist of permitted values. If that isn't possible, verify that the input contains only permitted content, such as alphanumeric characters.

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Last updated 1 year ago

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