CVE-2023-36827 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Path Traversal vulnerability in ethyca-fides. O3 Security confirms whether CVE-2023-36827 is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
Fides vulnerable to Path Traversal in Webserver API
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2023-36827.
Real-World Exposure
ethyca-fidesReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Fides is an open-source privacy engineering platform for managing the fulfillment of data privacy requests in a runtime environment, and the enforcement of privacy regulations in code. A path traversal (directory traversal) vulnerability affects fides versions lower than version 2.15.1, allowing remote attackers to access arbitrary files on the fides webserver container's filesystem. The vulnerability is patched in fides 2.15.1.
If the Fides webserver API is not directly accessible to attackers and is instead deployed behind a reverse proxy as recommended in Ethyca's security best practice documentation, and the reverse proxy is an AWS application load balancer, the vulnerability can't be exploited by these attackers. An AWS application load balancer will reject this attack with a 400 error. Additionally, any secrets supplied to the container using environment variables rather than a fides.toml configuration file are not affected by this vulnerability.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | ethyca-fides | all versions | 2.15.1 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for ethyca-fides. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update ethyca-fides to 2.15.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-36827 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 pinpoints whether CVE-2023-36827 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to CVE-2023-36827. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-36827 in your dependencies?
O3 detects CVE-2023-36827 across PyPI dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.