Gradle Shadow: Zip Slip path traversal in ShadowCopyAction — no independent entry-name sanitizationGHSA-rr8v-fxxf-c986

Summary

ShadowCopyAction in the Shadow plugin does not validate or sanitize ZIP entry names before writing them to the output fat JAR. A malicious upstream dependency containing path traversal sequences (e.g. ../../../../tmp/pwned.txt) in entry names will have those entries reproduced verbatim in the output shadow JAR.

Details

The vulnerability exists because Shadow relies entirely on Gradle's ZipFileTree for entry sanitization rather than implementing its own path validation. This means:

1. Users on Gradle < 7.6.2 / 8.x < 8.2.0 are directly exploitable
2. The produced shadow JAR becomes a Zip Slip weapon against any downstream consumer using unprotected extraction (raw ZipInputStream, older CI tooling, custom Java unpackers)
3. If Shadow ever uses a non-ZipFileTree code path, protection disappears silently

Affected file: src/main/kotlin/com/github/jengelman/gradle/plugins/shadow/internal/ShadowCopyAction.kt

PoC

1. Create a malicious JAR with path traversal entry:

import zipfile
with zipfile.ZipFile('evil.jar', 'w') as zf:
    zf.writestr('../../../../tmp/zipslip_proof.txt', 'pwned')

1. Add as dependency in a shadow project
2. Run gradle shadowJar
3. Run unzip -l build/libs/*.jar | grep "\.\."
4. Traversal entry survives in output JAR

Impact

Any tool extracting the shadow JAR with unprotected extraction is subject to arbitrary file overwrite. Users on older Gradle versions are directly vulnerable at build time.