mholt archiver up to 3.5.1 ZIP File archiver.Unarchive path traversal

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability, which was classified as critical, has been found in mholt archiver up to 3.5.1. Affected by this issue is the function archiver.Unarchive of the component ZIP File Handler. The manipulation leads to path traversal. This vulnerability is listed as CVE-2025-3445. The attack may be initiated remotely. There is no available exploit.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in mholt archiver up to 3.5.1. It has been rated as critical. This issue affects the function archiver.Unarchive of the component ZIP File Handler. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a path traversal vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-22. The product uses external input to construct a pathname that is intended to identify a file or directory that is located underneath a restricted parent directory, but the product does not properly neutralize special elements within the pathname that can cause the pathname to resolve to a location that is outside of the restricted directory. Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

A Path Traversal "Zip Slip" vulnerability has been identified in mholt/archiver in Go. This vulnerability allows using a crafted ZIP file containing path traversal symlinks to create or overwrite files with the user's privileges or application utilizing the library. When using the archiver.Unarchive functionality with ZIP files, like this: archiver.Unarchive(zipFile, outputDir),  A crafted ZIP file can be extracted in such a way that it writes files to the affected system with the same privileges as the application executing this vulnerable functionality. Consequently, sensitive files may be overwritten, potentially leading to privilege escalation, code execution, and other severe outcomes in some cases. It's worth noting that a similar vulnerability was found in TAR files (CVE-2024-0406). Although a fix was implemented, it hasn't been officially released, and the affected project has since been deprecated. The successor to mholt/archiver is a new project called mholt/archives, and its initial release (v0.1.0) removes the Unarchive() functionality.

The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2025-3445 since 04/08/2025. The exploitation is known to be difficult. The attack may be initiated remotely. No form of authentication is needed for a successful exploitation. Technical details are known, but no exploit is available. The price for an exploit might be around USD $0-$5k at the moment (estimation calculated on 04/14/2025). MITRE ATT&CK project uses the attack technique T1006 for this issue.

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

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Productinfo

Vendor

• mholt

Name

• archiver

Version

• 3.5.0
• 3.5.1

CPE 2.3info

• 🔍
• 🔍

CPE 2.2info

• 🔍
• 🔍

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