CVE-2023-36827: Fides vulnerable to Path Traversal in Webserver API

Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2023-07-05 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-22

Description

Fides is an open-source privacy engineering platform for managing the fulfillment of data privacy requests in a runtime environment, and the enforcement of privacy regulations in code. A path traversal (directory traversal) vulnerability affects fides versions lower than version `2.15.1`, allowing remote attackers to access arbitrary files on the fides webserver container's filesystem. The vulnerability is patched in fides `2.15.1`. If the Fides webserver API is not directly accessible to attackers and is instead deployed behind a reverse proxy as recommended in Ethyca's security best practice documentation, and the reverse proxy is an AWS application load balancer, the vulnerability can't be exploited by these attackers. An AWS application load balancer will reject this attack with a 400 error. Additionally, any secrets supplied to the container using environment variables rather than a `fides.toml` configuration file are not affected by this vulnerability.

Affected products

ethyca fides: before 2.15.1 — fixed in 2.15.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: ethyca fides 2.15.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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