What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-50558: Penelope unsafe tar extraction allows arbitrary local file write via crafted session archive

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.9 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-07-29 · updated 2026-10-23
• Weakness: CWE-22

Description

Penelope Shell Handler is a post-exploitation shell handler for authorized security testing. Prior to 0.20.0, the Unix download() implementation in penelope.py used tar.extractall(local_download_folder) on tar archives returned by remote sessions without validating member paths, allowing a malicious or compromised session to write files outside the intended download directory and potentially overwrite ~/.penelope/peneloperc. This issue is fixed in version 0.20.0.

Affected products

• brightio penelope: before 0.20.0

References

• https://github.com/brightio/penelope/commit/a040afb5db32c7e80b5e8a2f9b2164cf911cfa62
• https://github.com/brightio/penelope/releases/tag/v0.20.0
• https://github.com/brightio/penelope/security/advisories/GHSA-f42x-p2mx-hm8r
• https://github.com/brightio/penelope/security/advisories/GHSA-f42x-p2mx-hm8r

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