Path Traversal in Autolab

CVE-2022-41956

Autolab is a course management service, initially developed by a team of students at Carnegie Mellon University, that enables instructors to offer autograded programming assignments to their students over the Web. A file disclosure vulnerability was discovered in Autolab's remote handin feature, whereby users are able to hand-in assignments using paths outside their submission directory. Users can then view the submission to view the file's contents. The vulnerability has been patched in version 2.10.0. As a workaround, ensure that the field for the remote handin feature is empty (Edit Assessment > Advanced > Remote handin path), and that you are not running Autolab as `root` (or any user that has write access to `/`). Alternatively, disable the remote handin feature if it is unneeded by replacing the body of `local_submit` in `app/controllers/assessment/handin.rb` with `render(plain: "Feature disabled", status: :bad_request) && return`.

Vulnerability class: Path Traversal (Directory Traversal)

EPSS: 0.018 (75.8th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 6.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N.

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2022-41956?
CVE-2022-41956 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Autolab, classified under Path Traversal. CVSS score: 6.5/10. Published 2023-01-14.
How severe is CVE-2022-41956?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 6.5 out of 10.