Skip to content
Fencer Vulns
high 8.2

CVE-2023-52138 json

Path traversal via crafted cpio archives in Engrampa archivers

published 2024-02-05 2 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2023-56811

cvss
8.2
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.7%
EPSS 1.7% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 76%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Engrampa is an archive manager for the MATE environment. Engrampa is found to be vulnerable to a Path Traversal vulnerability that can be leveraged to achieve full Remote Command Execution (RCE) on the target. While handling CPIO archives, the Engrampa Archive manager follows symlink, cpio by default will follow stored symlinks while extracting and the Archiver will not check the symlink location, which leads to arbitrary file writes to unintended locations. When the victim extracts the archive, the attacker can craft a malicious cpio or ISO archive to achieve RCE on the target system. This vulnerability was fixed in commit 63d5dfa.

Patch / fix

  • mate-desktop engrampa 1.26.2
  • engrampa Debian 12 1.26.0-1+deb12u2
  • engrampa Debian 14, Debian 13 1.26.2-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2023-52138

  • engrampa Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS 1.12.0-2ubuntu0.1+esm1
  • engrampa Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS 1.20.0-1ubuntu0.1~esm1
  • engrampa Ubuntu Pro 20.04 LTS 1.24.0-2ubuntu0.1~esm1
  • engrampa Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS 1.26.0-1ubuntu1+esm1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2023-52138

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2023-52138 updated cvss 8.2

engrampa: remote command execution via path traversal vulnerability

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
no
Technical impact
total
Assessed
2 y ago

Exploit prediction

1.67% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 76% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/mate-desktop/engrampa/security/advisories/GHSA-c98h-v39w-3r7v referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 8.2 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:H/A:N
NVD 3.1 9.6 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected products

  • mate-desktop engrampa

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-25 Path Traversal: '/../filedir'
  • CWE-22 Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory
  • CWE-59 Improper Link Resolution Before File Access

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.