Axel Download Accelerator Path Traversal via URL Filename Decoding
- Published
- Last modified
- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean? →
- published
- Whether CISA lists it in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: proof that attackers are using it.What do these mean? →
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Fix
- Fix or patch referenced
- Whether working attack code is public (Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or GitHub). Public code makes attacks easier.What do these mean? →
- None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
Summary
Axel Download Accelerator, a command-line file downloader, is affected by this vulnerability. An attacker who supplies a specially crafted download URL can cause the program to save downloaded files to arbitrary locations on the filesystem outside the intended directory.
Summarized by anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5. Verify details against the original sources.
Read the original description
Axel Download Accelerator 2.17.14 and earlier performs URL percent-decoding (http_decode()) on the output filename after the URL has been parsed and the filename component extracted. This allows an attacker to embed %2e%2e%2f (URL-encoded ../) sequences in the URL path. These sequences survive the URL parser intact (they contain no literal / characters) but are decoded into directory traversal sequences before the output file is opened for writing. As a result, a crafted URL can cause axel to write downloaded content to arbitrary filesystem paths relative to the current working directory.
Timeline
- CVE published
- First seen by cve.now
Affected versions
- Axel Download Accelerator Axel
through 2.17.14