Cyber Posture

CVE-2025-27553

High

Published: 23 March 2025

Published
23 March 2025
Modified
02 April 2025
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
EPSS Score 0.0071 72.3th percentile
Risk Priority 15 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Description

Adversaries may search local system sources, such as file systems, configuration files, local databases, virtual machine files, or process memory, to find files of interest and sensitive data prior to Exfiltration.

Security Summary

CVE-2025-27553 is a relative path traversal vulnerability in the FileObject API of Apache Commons VFS versions prior to 2.10.0. The 'resolveFile' method accepts a 'scope' parameter, where specifying NameScope.DESCENDENT is intended to throw an exception if the resolved file is not a descendant of the base file. However, when the path includes encoded ".." characters, such as "%2E%2E/bar.txt", the method can return file objects outside the base file's descendant hierarchy without raising an exception, enabling unauthorized file access.

Remote attackers require no privileges or user interaction to exploit this vulnerability over the network with low complexity, as indicated by its CVSS v3.1 base score of 7.5 (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N). By supplying a malicious path to the resolveFile method with the DESCENDENT scope, an unauthenticated adversary can traverse directory boundaries and access sensitive files outside the intended scope, resulting in high-impact confidentiality violations without affecting integrity or availability.

Apache recommends upgrading to Commons VFS version 2.10.0, which addresses the issue. Official advisories, including those from the Apache mailing lists, OSS-Security, and Debian LTS announcements, confirm the fix and urge affected users to update promptly.

Details

CWE(s)
CWE-23

Affected Products

apache
commons vfs
≤ 2.10.0

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques

T1190 Exploit Public-Facing Application Initial Access
Adversaries may attempt to exploit a weakness in an Internet-facing host or system to initially access a network.
T1005 Data from Local System Collection
Adversaries may search local system sources, such as file systems, configuration files, local databases, virtual machine files, or process memory, to find files of interest and sensitive data prior to Exfiltration.
Why these techniques?

Remote unauthenticated path traversal in public-facing file API enables initial access via public app exploitation (T1190) and direct unauthorized local file data access (T1005).

Confidence: HIGH · MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise v19.0

References