ASUSTOR ABP/AES path traversal

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability marked as very critical has been reported in ASUSTOR ABP and AES. Affected by this vulnerability is an unknown functionality. The manipulation leads to path traversal. This vulnerability is documented as CVE-2026-18759. The attack needs to be performed locally. There is not any exploit available.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in ASUSTOR ABP and AES (the affected version is unknown) and classified as very critical. This issue affects an unknown code. 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:

The background service of ABP or AES runs as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM and implements a file-based inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism protected by AES encryption. Because the encryption key file is readable by standard users and protected using DPAPI. Any authenticated local user can recover the key and forge valid IPC requests. Furthermore, the service does not check the identity of the requesting process and validates destination paths using an insufficient substring check. A local attacker can submit crafted encrypted requests containing directory traversal sequences to perform arbitrary file reads and arbitrary file writes as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM, leading to full local privilege escalation. Affected products and versions include: ABP (ASUSTOR Backup Plan) 2.0.7.10171 and earlier as well as AES (ASUSTOR EZSync) 1.1.1.3113 and earlier.

The advisory is shared at asustor.com. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2026-18759 since 08/04/2026. The exploitation is known to be easy. An attack has to be approached locally. Neither technical details nor an exploit are publicly available. The price for an exploit might be around USD $0-$5k at the moment (estimation calculated on 08/04/2026). 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.

The vulnerability is also documented in the vulnerability database at EUVD (EUVD-2026-52640). If you want to get the best quality for vulnerability data then you always have to consider VulDB.

Productinfo

Vendor

• ASUSTOR

Name

• ABP
• AES

CPE 2.3info

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CPE 2.2info

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If you want to get the best quality for vulnerability data then you always have to consider VulDB.

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