CVE-2026-44307 - Mako vulnerable to path traversal via backslash URI on Windows in TemplateLookup

📡 GitHub-Advisory · 2026-05-06

CVE-2026-44307 - Mako vulnerable to path traversal via backslash URI on Windows in TemplateLookup

CVE-2026-44307

GHSA-2h4p-vjrc-8xpq HIGH pip/Mako

CVE: CVE-2026-44307

Summary

On Windows, a URI using backslash traversal (e.g. \..\..\ secret.txt) bypasses the directory traversal check in Template.__init__ and the posixpath-based normalization in TemplateLookup.get_template(), allowing reads of files outside the configured template directory.

Details

The root cause is a mismatch between posixpath (used for URI normalization in get_template()) and os.path (used for file access via os.path.isfile() and validation via os.path.normpath() in Template.__init__). On Windows, os.path is ntpath, which treats \ as a path separator, while posixpath treats it as a literal character.

The vulnerability chain:

1. get_template() strips only leading / via re.sub(r"^\/+", "", uri) and normalizes with posixpath — backslash \ is treated as a literal character, so \..\ secret.txt passes through with .. undetected.

2. Template.__init__() validation uses os.path.normpath() — on Windows this resolves \..\ secret.txt to \secret.txt, which does not start with .., so the startswith("..") check passes.

3. os.path.isfile() on Windows interprets \ as a path separator, resolving the .. traversal and finding files outside the template directory.

Affected code

  • mako/lookup.py: TemplateLookup.get_template() uses posixpath.normpath/posixpath.join for path construction but os.path.isfile() for existence check
  • mako/template.py: Template.__init__() URI validation uses os.path.normpath() which on Windows resolves backslash traversal to a form that passes the startswith("..") guard

Impact

If an application passes user-controlled template names or include paths to TemplateLookup.get_template(), an attacker on Windows may be able to load and disclose readable files outside the configured template directory. The primary impact is local file disclosure. If the targeted file contains Mako/Python template syntax, it may also be parsed and executed as a template.

Remedia


📌 来源: GitHub-Advisory | 🆔 CVE-2026-44307 | 📅 2026-05-06

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