An issue was discovered in zola 0.13.0 through 0.17.2. The custom implementation of a web server, available via the "zola serve" command, allows directory traversal. The handle_request function, used by the server to process HTTP requests, does not account for sequences of special path control characters (../) in the URL when serving a file, which allows one to escape the webroot of the server and read arbitrary files from the filesystem.

References

• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-40274
• getzola/zola#2257
• getzola/zola#2258