CVE-2023-36827 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Path Traversal vulnerability in ethyca-fides. A fix is available for ethyca-fides — see the affected versions and patch details below.
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.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-36827 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 379,145 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
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 | 2.15.1pip install --upgrade 'ethyca-fides==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, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
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 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2023-36827 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
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 Security finds CVE-2023-36827 across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.