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Crawl4AI: Arbitrary file write (path traversal) in crawler downloads can lead to RCEGHSA-2jq4-q6vv-4cp3

CRITICAL

GHSA-2jq4-q6vv-4cp3 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.6) Path Traversal vulnerability in crawl4ai. A fix is available for crawl4ai — see the affected versions and patch details below.

Also known asCVE-2026-57571PYSEC-2026-2138
Published
Updated
Affected
1 pkg
Patched
1 / 1
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Oct 26, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, FIRST.org (EPSS)

Exploitation Status

No confirmed exploitation observed yet

  • A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
  • 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 GHSA-2jq4-q6vv-4cp3.

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
0.8%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk0.00%
Lower risk than most CVEs57th percentile — riskier than 57% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.10%0.50%0.90%1.31%0.6%0.8%0.8%0.8%Aug 26Oct 26Oct 26

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.

How urgent is this, really

GHSA-2jq4-q6vv-4cp3 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.

Where this sits among everything scored

Of 396,966 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.

Real-World Exposure

1 pkg affected
🐍crawl4ai

Real-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

Summary

When the crawler saves a downloaded file, the destination filename was taken from attacker-influenced input and joined to the downloads directory with no confinement. A filename containing an absolute path (e.g. /etc/cron.d/evil) or ../ traversal escaped the downloads directory, giving an arbitrary file write with attacker-controlled contents. Because the written bytes are attacker-controlled, this escalates to remote code execution (overwriting a shell rc-file, ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, a cron entry, or a Python module on the import path).

Affected paths

Two download sinks in crawl4ai/async_crawler_strategy.py:

  • HTTP crawler (AsyncHTTPCrawlerStrategy): the filename is parsed from the response Content-Disposition header by _extract_filename() and written via aiofiles.open(filepath, 'wb'). Reachable directly via the SDK, and via the unauthenticated Docker /crawl endpoint when an HTTPCrawlerConfig is supplied.
  • Browser crawler (AsyncPlaywrightCrawlerStrategy): the download's suggested_filename (controllable by the visited page) is joined to downloads_path and written via download.save_as().

The HTTP-strategy sink is reachable pre-auth on the default Docker deployment; both are reachable for SDK users simply by crawling an attacker-controlled URL. The default Playwright crawl path that does not trigger a download is unaffected.

Impact

Arbitrary file write with attacker-controlled content as the user running the crawler, escalating to remote code execution.

Fix

Both sinks now resolve the destination through a single hardened helper (_safe_download_filepath) that reduces the attacker-influenced name to a bare basename (dropping absolute paths and .. components) and re-checks, via realpath, that the resolved path stays inside the downloads root (defeating symlink/TOCTOU escapes). A traversal attempt is rejected; normal downloads are unchanged.

Workarounds

  • Upgrade to the patched version (0.9.0).
  • Run the crawler as an unprivileged user with a dedicated, isolated downloads directory on a volume with no sensitive paths writable.
  • Enable authentication (CRAWL4AI_API_TOKEN) on the Docker server.

Credits

Y4tacker - reported the Content-Disposition path traversal in the HTTP crawler with a clear PoC and a basename + realpath-containment fix recommendation.

Affected Packages

1 total 1 fixed
EcosystemPackageVulnerable rangeFix
🐍PyPIcrawl4aiall versions0.9.0pip install --upgrade 'crawl4ai==0.9.0'

Affected Products

1 product · 1 configurations
Application
crawl4aikidocode
< 0.9.0
range

Detection & mitigation playbook

Open-source dependency

  1. Detect

    Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for crawl4ai, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.

  2. Fix

    Update crawl4ai to 0.9.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-2jq4-q6vv-4cp3 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.

  3. Workarounds

    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.

Frequently Asked Questions

### Summary When the crawler saves a downloaded file, the destination filename was taken from attacker-influenced input and joined to the downloads directory with no confinement. A filename containing an absolute path (e.g. `/etc/cron.d/evil`) or `../` traversal escaped the downloads directory, giving an arbitrary file write with attacker-controlled contents. Because the written bytes are attacker-controlled, this escalates to remote code execution (overwriting a shell rc-file, `~/.ssh/authorized_keys`, a cron entry, or a Python module on the import path). ### Affected paths Two download si
O3 Security · Impact-Aware SCA

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Crawl4AI: Arbitrary file write (path traversal) in crawler…