Path traversal in Natural Language Toolkit - CVE-2019-14751
Published: September 2, 2019
Vulnerability identifier: #VU20543
CSH Severity: Medium
CVSS v4: 8.7 [CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N]
CVE-ID: CVE-2019-14751
CWE-ID: CWE-22
Exploitation vector: Remote access
Exploit availability:
No public exploit available
Vulnerability details
The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to write arbitrary files on the target system.
The vulnerability exists due to the affected software does not properly handle ZIP archives during extraction. A remote attacker can by extract a ZIP archive that contains malicious traversal characters and write arbitrary files via a ../ (dot dot slash) on the system.
Affected software
Natural Language Toolkit
nltk (Ubuntu package)
python-nltk
SUSE Linux
Opensuse
Fedora
nltk (Ubuntu package)
python-nltk
SUSE Linux
Opensuse
Fedora
How to mitigate CVE-2019-14751
Install updates from vendor's website.
Natural Language Toolkit - update to 3.4.5
nltk (Ubuntu package) - addressed in versions 3.1-1ubuntu0.1, 3.2.5-1ubuntu0.1, 3.4-1ubuntu0.1
python-nltk - addressed in versions 3.4.5-2.fc31, 3.4.5-2.fc32
nltk (Ubuntu package) - addressed in versions 3.1-1ubuntu0.1, 3.2.5-1ubuntu0.1, 3.4-1ubuntu0.1
python-nltk - addressed in versions 3.4.5-2.fc31, 3.4.5-2.fc32