What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-53633: Chall-Manager's scenario decoding process does not check for zip bombs

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-07-10 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-405

Description

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 size of the decoded content is not checked, potentially leading to zip bombs decompression. 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 14042aa and shipped in v0.1.4.

Affected products

• ctfer-io chall-manager: before 0.1.4 — fixed in 0.1.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: ctfer-io chall-manager 0.1.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/ctfer-io/chall-manager/commit/14042aa66a577caee777e10fe09adcf2587d20dd
• https://github.com/ctfer-io/chall-manager/releases/tag/v0.1.4
• https://github.com/ctfer-io/chall-manager/security/advisories/GHSA-r7fm-3pqm-ww5w

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