Mako vulnerable to path traversal via backslash URI on Windows in TemplateLookup

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.

Remediation

The fix should normalize backslashes to forward slashes early in the URI processing pipeline, before any path operations, to ensure consistent behavior across platforms.