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MEDIUM severity

malcontent vulnerable to symlink Path Traversal via handleSymlink argument confusion in archive extractionGHSA-923j-vrcg-hxwh

MEDIUMFix: chainguard-dev/malcontent@259fca5

GHSA-923j-vrcg-hxwh is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.5) Path Traversal vulnerability in github.com/chainguard-dev/malcontent. A fix is available for github.com/chainguard-dev/malcontent — see the affected versions and patch details below.

Also known asCVE-2026-24846GO-2026-4391
Published
Updated
Affected
1 pkg
Patched
1 / 1
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Nov 6, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, FIRST.org (EPSS)

Exploitation Status

No confirmed exploitation observed yet

  • 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-923j-vrcg-hxwh.

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
0.2%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk0.00%
Lower risk than most CVEs8th percentile — riskier than 8% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.00%0.23%0.46%0.69%0.0%0.2%May 26Sep 26Nov 26

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

How urgent is this, really

Where this sits among everything scored

Real-World Exposure

1 pkg affected
🐹github.com/chainguard-dev/malcontent

Real-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Go packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.

Description

malcontent could be made to create symlinks outside the intended extraction directory when scanning a specially crafted tar or deb archive. The handleSymlink function received arguments in the wrong order, causing the symlink target to be used as the symlink location. Additionally, symlink targets were not validated to ensure they resolved within the extraction directory.

Fixes:

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Oleh Konko from 1seal for discovering and reporting this issue.

Affected Packages

1 total 1 fixed
EcosystemPackageVulnerable rangeFix
🐹Gogithub.com/chainguard-dev/malcontent≥ 1.8.0&&< 1.20.31.20.3go get github.com/chainguard-dev/malcontent@v1.20.3

Affected Products

1 product · 1 configurations
Application
malcontentchainguard
≥ 1.8.0 && < 1.20.3
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 github.com/chainguard-dev/malcontent, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.

  2. Fix

    Update github.com/chainguard-dev/malcontent to 1.20.3 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-923j-vrcg-hxwh 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

malcontent could be made to create symlinks outside the intended extraction directory when scanning a specially crafted tar or deb archive. The `handleSymlink` function received arguments in the wrong order, causing the symlink target to be used as the symlink location. Additionally, symlink targets were not validated to ensure they resolved within the extraction directory. **Fixes:** - [Swap handleSymlink arguments; validate symlink location](https://github.com/chainguard-dev/malcontent/commit/a7dd8a5328ddbaf235568437813efa7591e00017) - [Validate symlink targets resolve within extraction dir
O3 Security · Impact-Aware SCA

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malcontent vulnerable to symlink Path Traversal via…