CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-39208 — SharpCompress is a fully managed C# library to deal with many compression types and formats

Medium CVSS 4.3

SharpCompress is a fully managed C# library to deal with many compression types and formats. Versions prior to 0.29.0 are vulnerable to partial path traversal. SharpCompress recreates a hierarchy of directories under destinationDirectory if ExtractFullPath is set to true in options. In order to prevent extraction outside the destination directory the destinationFileName path is verified to begin with fullDestinationDirectoryPath. However, prior to version 0.29.0, it is not enforced that fullDestinationDirectoryPath ends with slash. If the destinationDirectory is not slash terminated like `/home/user/dir` it is possible to create a file with a name thats begins as the destination directory one level up from the directory, i.e. `/home/user/dir.sh`. Because of the file name and destination directory constraints the arbitrary file creation impact is limited and depends on the use case. This issue is fixed in SharpCompress version 0.29.0.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
4.3 (3.1)
Published
2021-09-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-22

Affected products

  • sharpcompress_project / sharpcompress

Matched remediation archetype

Path traversal, unsafe upload, and file handling

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Trace untrusted filenames, archive entries, URLs, and path segments into read, write, include, extraction, and upload operations.
  • Identify filesystem roots, mount permissions, symbolic-link behavior, archive handling, and whether uploaded content is web-accessible or executable.
  • Review canonicalization and containment checks across supported operating systems and storage backends.

Remediate safely

  • Generate server-side storage identifiers and resolve paths beneath a fixed root using filesystem-aware containment checks.
  • Reject absolute, parent-relative, alternate-separator, device, link, and archive entries that escape the intended root.
  • Store uploads outside executable or served paths, validate type and size, and use private atomic temporary files.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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