CVE-2023-38950
HIGHCVE-2023-38950 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Path Traversal vulnerability. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2025-05-19) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
A path traversal vulnerability in the iclock API of ZKTeco BioTime v8.5.5 allows unauthenticated attackers to read arbitrary files via supplying a crafted payload. This vulnerability…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2025-05-19. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2025-06-09.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2023-38950.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-38950 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). In the shaded patch-first corner (EPSS 50%+, CVSS 7.0+).
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the ≥ 90% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
A path traversal vulnerability in the iclock API of ZKTeco BioTime v8.5.5 allows unauthenticated attackers to read arbitrary files via supplying a crafted payload. This vulnerability was fixed in version 9.0.120240617.19506 of ZKBioTime.
Affected Products
biotimezktecoDetection & mitigation playbook
VulnerabilityDetect
Identify every host running the affected component and compare the installed build against the fixed version below — for source-built or distro-packaged software the version string, not a lockfile, is the source of truth (`dpkg -l`, `rpm -q`, or the binary's own `--version`).
Remediation status
No fixed release is recorded for CVE-2023-38950 yet. Track the upstream advisory, and apply the exposure-reduction steps below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
Resolve every user-supplied path to its canonical form and reject anything that escapes the intended directory, and run the component under an account that has no read or write access outside the directory it legitimately serves.
How to detect CVE-2023-38950
A community-maintained Nuclei template exists for this CVE. You can scan for it directly:
nuclei -id cve-2023-38950 -u https://target- Template
- ZKTeco BioTime v8.5.5 - Path Traversal
- Severity
- high
- Impact
- Unauthenticated attackers can read arbitrary files from the server through path traversal in the iclock API url parameter, potentially exposing employee biometric data, attendance records, and system credentials.
- Remediation
- Update ZKTeco BioTime to a version newer than 8.5.5 that validates file paths in the iclock API and restricts access to authorized files only.
Template by ProjectDiscovery nuclei-templates (iamnoooob, pdresearch), MIT licensed. View the full template. Scan only systems you are authorised to test.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-38950 in your dependencies?
Find it across , including transitive dependencies.