CVE-2026-44788 — SharpCompress

Summary

A path traversal vulnerability in IArchive.WriteToDirectory() allows a malicious archive to create directories outside the intended extraction root. For TAR archives, this can be escalated to arbitrary file writes by chaining with a symlink entry, giving a full write primitive on the target filesystem subject to the permissions of the running process.

Details

The vulnerable code is in the directory-entry branch of WriteToDirectoryInternal (sync, IArchiveExtensions.cs:48–61) and WriteToDirectoryAsyncInternal (async, IAsyncArchiveExtensions.cs:70–84):

var dirPath = Path.Combine(destinationDirectory, entry.Key);
Directory.CreateDirectory(Path.GetDirectoryName(dirPath + "/"));

No Path.GetFullPath() normalisation and no bounds check are applied before the Directory.CreateDirectory call. Two .NET Path.Combine behaviours make this exploitable:

• Relative traversal: Path.Combine("/safe/extract", "../../evil") → the OS resolves .. segments on the raw path, placing the directory outside the extraction root.
• Absolute path override: Path.Combine("/safe/extract", "/tmp/evil") → returns "/tmp/evil" — the base is discarded entirely for rooted paths.

File entries are not directly affected — they route through ExtractionMethods.WriteEntryToDirectory which applies the correct guard (GetFullPath + StartsWith, see ExtractionMethods.cs:54–65). The directory-entry branch is a separate fast-path that was added without that guard.

Affected archive formats: ZIP and TAR (non-solid). Solid archives and 7-Zip use the reader path which calls the secure method.

Escalation to arbitrary file writes (TAR only)

Path.GetFullPath on .NET does not resolve symlinks — it only normalises . and .. segments. This means the file-entry guard in ExtractionMethods.WriteEntryToDirectory can be bypassed via symlink chaining in TAR archives when the caller supplies a SymbolicLinkHandler:

archive.WriteToDirectory("/safe/extract", new ExtractionOptions
{
    ExtractFullPath = true,
    SymbolicLinkHandler = (linkPath, linkTarget) =>
        File.CreateSymbolicLink(linkPath, linkTarget)  // naive — no validation of linkTarget
});

Attack sequence in a single TAR archive:

1. Symlink entry — link → ../evil_outside/ The SymbolicLinkHandler creates /safe/extract/link pointing outside the extraction root.

2. File entry — link/secret.txt ExtractionMethods.WriteEntryToDirectory computes:

   • destdir = Path.GetFullPath("/safe/extract/link") → "/safe/extract/link" — textually inside root, check passes ✓
   • File.Open("/safe/extract/link/secret.txt") — OS follows symlink, file is written to /evil_outside/secret.txt

The library does not validate linkTarget before passing it to the caller's handler, and the XML docs do not warn that it may be a traversal path. The idiomatic handler implementation above is therefore silently exploitable.

ZIP does not support symlinks in SharpCompress (ZipEntry.LinkTarget always returns null), so this escalation is TAR-only.

Recommended fix — apply the same pattern from ExtractionMethods.WriteEntryToDirectory to both affected files:

var fullDestDir = Path.GetFullPath(destinationDirectory);
if (!fullDestDir.EndsWith(Path.DirectorySeparatorChar))
    fullDestDir += Path.DirectorySeparatorChar;

var dirPath = Path.GetFullPath(Path.Combine(fullDestDir, entry.Key));
if (!dirPath.StartsWith(fullDestDir, PathComparison))
    throw new ExtractionException(
        "Entry is trying to create a directory outside of the destination directory.");

Directory.CreateDirectory(dirPath);

Additionally, the library should validate LinkTarget before invoking the caller's SymbolicLinkHandler, or document clearly that callers must validate it themselves.

PoC

A self-contained .NET console app is available at: https://github.com/svenclaesson/poc-sharpcompress-traversal

git clone https://github.com/svenclaesson/poc-sharpcompress-traversal
cd poc-sharpcompress-traversal
dotnet run

The PoC crafts a ZIP with three directory entries (../../escaped_relative/, /tmp/escaped_absolute/, safe_subdir/) using System.IO.Compression (stdlib), then extracts with SharpCompress. Output shows [ESCAPED] for the two malicious entries and [ok] for the legitimate one, on both sync and async APIs.

Tested against SharpCompress 0.47.4 (latest NuGet).

Impact

This is a path traversal / zip slip vulnerability (CWE-22). Any application that calls archive.WriteToDirectory() on an untrusted archive is affected — which covers the primary documented extraction API.

For ZIP archives the impact is limited to arbitrary directory creation, which can be used to stage privilege escalation (e.g. cron drop-ins, XDG config paths, service spool directories) or shadow expected paths to alter application behaviour.

For TAR archives, callers that implement a SymbolicLinkHandler — which is the only way to faithfully restore a TAR — are exposed to a full arbitrary file write primitive via the symlink chaining described above.