Path traversal is also known as directory traversal. These vulnerabilities enable an attacker to read arbitrary files on the server that is running an application. In this case, an attacker might be able to write to arbitrary files on the server, allowing them to modify application data or behavior, and ultimately take full control of the server.
The file handler function trusts the filename provided by the user. This includes the cases when the user uses a path instead of the filename. This makes possible to write arbitrary files to the system and replace the files owned by kuiper user on the filesystem. The vulnerable function is fileUploadHandler
which is shown below:
https://github.com/lf-edge/ekuiper/blob/1e6b6b6601445eb05316532f5fbef7f0a863ecfe/internal/server/rest.go#L329-L359
Exploitation of this vulnerability allows an attacker to rewrite the files owned by ekuiper including the main kuiper binaries as they are owned by kuiper user:
/kuiper/data/uploads
directory. So let's move to the /kuiper/data
, examine the existing files and create an empty traversal-poc
file owned by kuiper:../test
:In the response we can see the path of the uploaded file and can assume that the traversal worked.
traversal-poc
file that we know exists on the server. It can be made with the following request:Reported by Alexey Kosmachev, Lead Pentester from Bi.Zone
{ "github_reviewed": true, "nvd_published_at": null, "severity": "HIGH", "cwe_ids": [ "CWE-24" ], "github_reviewed_at": "2025-07-03T14:18:04Z" }