What is CVE-2021-21272?

CVE-2021-21272 is a high-severity vulnerability in Deislabs Oras, classified under Path Traversal. CVSS score: 7.7/10. Published 2021-01-25.

How severe is CVE-2021-21272?

High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.7 out of 10.

Path Traversal in Deislabs Oras

CVE-2021-21272

ORAS is open source software which enables a way to push OCI Artifacts to OCI Conformant registries. ORAS is both a CLI for initial testing and a Go Module. In ORAS from version 0.4.0 and before version 0.9.0, there is a "zip-slip" vulnerability. The directory support feature allows the downloaded gzipped tarballs to be automatically extracted to the user-specified directory where the tarball can have symbolic links and hard links. A well-crafted tarball or tarballs allow malicious artifact providers linking, writing, or overwriting specific files on the host filesystem outside of the user-specified directory unexpectedly with the same permissions as the user who runs `oras pull`. Users of the affected versions are impacted if they are `oras` CLI users who runs `oras pull`, or if they are Go programs, which invoke `github.com/deislabs/oras/pkg/content.FileStore`. The problem has been fixed in version 0.9.0. For `oras` CLI users, there is no workarounds other than pulling from a trusted artifact provider. For `oras` package users, the workaround is to not use `github.com/deislabs/oras/pkg/content.FileStore`, and use other content stores instead, or pull from a trusted artifact provider.

Vulnerability class: Path Traversal (Directory Traversal)

Published 2021-01-25 · last modified 2026-06-17.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 7.7 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:H/A:N.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.014 (72.3th percentile), scored 2026-10-01.

Low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, but still tracked. 72nd percentile — 72.3% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.014 · newest: 0.014 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Deislabs Oras — versions >= 0.4.0, < 0.9.0

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

github.com/deislabs/oras/security/advisories/GHSA-g5v4-5x39-vwhx (Patch, Vendor Advisory)
github.com/deislabs/oras/commit/96cd90423303f1bb42bd043cb4c36085e6e91e8e (Patch)
github.com/deislabs/oras/releases/tag/v0.9.0 (Release Notes)
pkg.go.dev/github.com/deislabs/oras/pkg/oras (Third Party Advisory)

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2021-21272?: CVE-2021-21272 is a high-severity vulnerability in Deislabs Oras, classified under Path Traversal. CVSS score: 7.7/10. Published 2021-01-25.
How severe is CVE-2021-21272?: High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.7 out of 10.