GHSA-gjfg-22fp-rrxx is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.1) Path Traversal vulnerability in composer/composer. O3 Security confirms whether GHSA-gjfg-22fp-rrxx is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
Composer: Path traversal in package bin field lets dependencies chmod arbitrary host files
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-gjfg-22fp-rrxx.
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
GHSA-gjfg-22fp-rrxx 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 370,894 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
composer/composer🐘composer/composerReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Packagist packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Summary
A Composer package declares its executables in the bin field of its composer.json. When Composer installs a package, it processes each bin entry and changes the file mode of the corresponding file so it is executable.
If a bin entry contains .. path segments, it can resolve to a path outside the package's own install directory. A malicious package can use this to make Composer run chmod against a file that already exists elsewhere on the machine. The resulting mode is world-readable and world-executable (0755 under the common umask of 022). This happens when the package is installed, e.g. during composer install, composer update, and composer require. Any dependency can trigger it, including a transitive dependency several levels deep.
The vulnerability changes file permissions only, and does not read, modify, or execute the contents of the target file, and it is not remote code execution. The impact is to confidentiality: a file with deliberately restrictive permissions, such as a private key at mode 0600, can be made readable by other users on the same host.
Am I affected?
We reviewed packagist.org data and found no evidence that any published package exploited this vulnerability. If you install packages only from packagist.org, you are not affected by any known exploitation.
You are potentially affected if all of the following are true:
- Your Composer project depends, directly or transitively, on a package you do not fully trust.
- A file you rely on for its restrictive permissions already exists at a path the Composer process can write to. Examples include SSH private keys,
.envfiles,~/.aws/credentials, and.netrc.
The most likely way to be affected is to add or update a dependency that is malicious or has been compromised, then run an install on a machine that holds sensitive, permission-restricted files.
Two points to note:
--no-scripts,--no-plugins, and anallow-pluginsallow-list do not prevent this. The permission change happens during normal binary installation, outside the plugin and script trust model.- Impact scales with privilege: As a regular user, only files owned by that user can be affected, which typically means your own secrets becoming readable by other local users on a shared machine. As root (for example, a CI container with no non-root user, or
sudo composer install), any file on the system can be affected, including system credential stores.
Patched versions
The fix makes Composer reject any package whose binary entry contains a .. path segment. During install/update the operation aborts before any file permission is changed, and the same check now also applies when a package is published to Packagist.org, so such packages are refused upstream.
Fixed in 2.2.29 (2.2 LTS line) and 2.10.2 (current 2.x line). Composer 1.x is end of life and will not be patched. 1.x users should upgrade to a patched 2.x release.
Workarounds
Upgrading to a patched release is the only complete fix. There is no configuration option that disables the vulnerable behavior.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐘Packagist | composer/composer | ≥ 2.3.0&&< 2.10.2 | 2.10.2 |
| 🐘Packagist | composer/composer | ≥ 1.0.0&&< 2.2.29 | 2.2.29 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for composer/composer. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update composer/composer to 2.10.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-gjfg-22fp-rrxx 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 pinpoints whether GHSA-gjfg-22fp-rrxx is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to GHSA-gjfg-22fp-rrxx. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
Red Hat ships Composer version 2.10.2 in its products, which already includes the fix for this issue. Community distributions have been notified.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-gjfg-22fp-rrxx in your dependencies?
O3 detects GHSA-gjfg-22fp-rrxx across Packagist dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.