CVE-2023-52138 | Path traversal via crafted cpio archives in Engrampa archivers

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Engrampa is an archive manager for the MATE environment. Engrampa is found to be vulnerable to a Path Traversal vulnerability that can be leveraged to achieve full Remote Command Execution (RCE) on the target. While handling CPIO archives, the Engrampa Archive manager follows symlink, cpio by default will follow stored symlinks while extracting and the Archiver will not check the symlink location, which leads to arbitrary file writes to unintended locations. When the victim extracts the archive, the attacker can craft a malicious cpio or ISO archive to achieve RCE on the target system. This vulnerability was fixed in commit 63d5dfa.

Published: 2024-02-05 Last update: 2025-02-13 Assigner: [email protected] Source: [email protected]
NVD Status：Modified，CVE State: published
View at NVD, CVE.org, EUVD

CVE-2023-52138 is rated High Exploit Risk (78.3/100): CVSS High severity, with medium exploitation likelihood (EPSS 2.53%). 1 public exploit reference(s) are indexed (Exploit-DB). Public exploits are available—assess exposure, apply mitigations, and prioritize patching.

Risk is dynamic; we continuously reassess and refresh what is shown on this page as upstream context changes.

Public exploit references (Exploit-DB) for CVE-2023-52138

EDB-ID Source Kind Published Link
— nvd_ref exploit_tag Exploit-DB ↗

Exploit prediction scoring system (EPSS) score for CVE-2023-52138

EPSS lead: Daily EPSS estimates relative likelihood of exploitation; percentile ranks this CVE among scored vulnerabilities (higher = more severe relative rank).

# Date Old EPSS score New EPSS score Delta (New - Old)
1 2026-02-23 1.88% 2.53% +0.65%
2 2025-11-21 0.69% 1.88% +1.19%
3 2025-11-18 — 0.69% —

Full EPSS history (17 records total)

Common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) metrics for CVE-2023-52138

CVSS metrics for this CVE.

Base score Version Severity Vector Exploitability Impact Score source
8.2 3.1 HIGH
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:H/A:N Click to expand
Attack vector (AV:N)
Could be attacked over the internet or any normal routed network—not just someone sitting at the machine.
Attack complexity (AC:L)
Once they can reach the bug, pulling it off is straightforward—no weird race conditions or rare setup.
Privileges required (PR:N)
No account or special rights needed—anonymous or random user is enough.
User interaction (UI:R)
A real person has to do something—click, install, enable—otherwise it doesn’t land.
Scope (S:C)
Breaking this can reach past the original component and bite other resources—bigger blast radius.
Confidentiality (C:L)
Some sensitive info could get out, but not a total data dump.
Integrity (I:H)
They could widely tamper with or forge data—trust in the data is badly hurt.
Availability (A:N)
Service keeps running; no real outage angle.
 2.8 4.7 [email protected]
9.6 3.1 CRITICAL
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H Click to expand
Attack vector (AV:N)
Could be attacked over the internet or any normal routed network—not just someone sitting at the machine.
Attack complexity (AC:L)
Once they can reach the bug, pulling it off is straightforward—no weird race conditions or rare setup.
Privileges required (PR:N)
No account or special rights needed—anonymous or random user is enough.
User interaction (UI:R)
A real person has to do something—click, install, enable—otherwise it doesn’t land.
Scope (S:C)
Breaking this can reach past the original component and bite other resources—bigger blast radius.
Confidentiality (C:H)
Serious risk that confidential data gets exposed in a big way.
Integrity (I:H)
They could widely tamper with or forge data—trust in the data is badly hurt.
Availability (A:H)
Could take the service down hard or make it unusable for people who depend on it.
 2.8 6.0 [email protected]

Weakness enumeration for CVE-2023-52138

OS Trackers for CVE-2023-52138

vendor priority summary link
alpine — CVE-2023-52138: 1 source package rows (engrampa); 2 state rows across 2 repos (3.19-community, 3.20-community); fixed 0, open 2. https://security.alpinelinux.org/vuln/CVE-2023-52138
debian not yet assigned CVE-2023-52138 not yet assigned priority: Debian including 1 source packages (engrampa), 5 status rows across 5 suites (bookworm, bullseye, forky, sid, trixie): resolved 5. https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2023-52138
ubuntu medium CVE-2023-52138 medium priority: Ubuntu including 1 source packages (engrampa), 11 status rows across 11 suites (bionic, focal, jammy, mantic, noble, oracular, plucky, questing, trusty, upstream, xenial): needs-triage 5, not-affected 3, DNE 1, ignored 1, released 1. https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2023-52138

Affected software / configurations for CVE-2023-52138

Vendor Product Version Raw CPE
mate-desktop engrampa < 1.26.2 cpe:2.3:a:mate-desktop:engrampa:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*

References for CVE-2023-52138

cvelogic Threat Intelligence