CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-53632 — Chall-Manager is a platform-agnostic system able to start Challenges on Demand of a player

Critical CVSS 9.1

Chall-Manager is a platform-agnostic system able to start Challenges on Demand of a player. When decoding a scenario (i.e. a zip archive), the path of the file to write is not checked, potentially leading to zip slips. Exploitation does not require authentication nor authorization, so anyone can exploit it. It should nonetheless not be exploitable as it is highly recommended to bury Chall-Manager deep within the infrastructure due to its large capabilities, so no users could reach the system. Patch has been implemented by commit 47d188f and shipped in v0.1.4.

Severity
Critical
CVSS
9.1 (3.1)
Published
2025-07-10
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-22

Affected products

  • ctfer-io / chall-manager

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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