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CVE-2022-29238

Forced Browsing in Jupyter Notebook

CVSS 4.3 MEDIUMEPSS 1.0%CWE-425
In short

Jupyter Notebook prior to version 6.4.12 allowed authenticated users to access hidden files and directories even when they were supposed to be hidden, if the user could guess their names. This means sensitive files like SSH keys could be reached when they should have been blocked.

Technical detail

An authenticated user can bypass the `ContentsManager.allow_hidden = False` access control by making direct requests to hidden files or files within hidden directories, provided the file path is known or guessable. The vulnerability requires prior authentication and does not escalate privileges, but allows unintended access to files that administrators expected to be inaccessible through the web interface.

Summary generated and translated by AI from the official description.
Jupyter Notebook is a web-based notebook environment for interactive computing. Prior to version 6.4.12, authenticated requests to the notebook server with `ContentsManager.allow_hidden = False` only prevented listing the contents of hidden directories, not accessing individual hidden files or files in hidden directories (i.e. hidden files were 'hidden' but not 'inaccessible'). This could lead to notebook configurations allowing authenticated access to files that may reasonably be expected to be disallowed. Because fully authenticated requests are required, this is of relatively low impact. But if a server's root directory contains sensitive files whose only protection from the server is being hidden (e.g. `~/.ssh` while serving $HOME), then any authenticated requests could access files if their names are guessable. Such contexts also necessarily have full access to the server and therefore execution permissions, which also generally grants access to all the same files. So this does not generally result in any privilege escalation or increase in information access, only an additional, unintended means by which the files could be accessed. Version 6.4.12 contains a patch for this issue. There are currently no known workarounds.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
Affected products
jupyter · notebook

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