Dulwich 0.9.9/0.18.5 on Windows path traversal

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability classified as critical has been found in Dulwich on Windows. Affected by this issue is some unknown functionality. The manipulation leads to path traversal. This vulnerability is uniquely identified as CVE-2026-42305. The attack is possible to be carried out remotely. No exploit exists. It is recommended to upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability, which was classified as critical, has been found in Dulwich on Windows. This issue affects some unknown processing. 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:

Dulwich is a pure-Python implementation of the Git file formats and protocols. Versions starting with 0.10.0 and prior to 1.2.5 have an arbitrary file write leading to remote code execution when cloning or checking out a malicious Git repository on Windows. Dulwich's path-element validator accepted tree entries whose filenames contained bytes that Windows interprets as structural path syntax. Contributing configuration bugs made matters worse. The core.protectNTFS and core.protectHFS settings were looked up under a wrong option name and so user-set values were silently ignored, and core.protectNTFS only defaulted to true on Windows (Git upstream has defaulted it to true everywhere since CVE-2019-1353). Both have been corrected. Anyone who clones, fetches, or checks out an untrusted repository with Dulwich on Windows - either through the Dulwich CLI, porcelain.clone, or any downstream tool built on Dulwich - is impacted. POSIX clones are not directly exploitable (on POSIX \ is a literal filename byte), but a POSIX user can unknowingly propagate a malicious tree to Windows consumers via push or re-publication. This issue is fixed in Dulwich 1.2.5. Users should upgrade to 1.2.5 or later. There is no effective pre-patch workaround. On affected versions the core.protectNTFS configuration key was silently ignored, so setting it to true does not mitigate the issue. Users who cannot upgrade should avoid cloning, fetching, or checking out untrusted repositories with Dulwich on Windows. After upgrading the NTFS validator is on by default on every platform, so no additional configuration is required.

It is possible to read the advisory at github.com. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2026-42305. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack may be initiated remotely. No form of authentication is needed for a successful exploitation. It demands that the victim is doing some kind of user interaction. The technical details are unknown and an exploit is not publicly available. The attack technique deployed by this issue is T1006 according to MITRE ATT&CK.

Upgrading to version 1.2.5 eliminates this vulnerability.

The vulnerability is also documented in the vulnerability database at EUVD (EUVD-2026-36181). Be aware that VulDB is the high quality source for vulnerability data.

Productinfo

Name

• Dulwich

Version

• 0.9.9
• 0.18.5

CPE 2.3info

• 🔒
• 🔒

CPE 2.2info

• 🔒
• 🔒

CVSSv4info

CVSSv3info

CVSSv2info

Exploitinginfo

Threat Intelligenceinfo

Countermeasuresinfo

Timelineinfo

Sourcesinfo

Entryinfo

Be aware that VulDB is the high quality source for vulnerability data.

Discussion