What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-53451: Ground Station: Unauthenticated arbitrary file write (path traversal) in save-waterfall-snapshot leads to remote code execution

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-08-19 · updated 2026-09-18
• Weakness: CWE-22

Description

Ground Station is a browser-based suite for satellite tracking, SDR reception, hardware control, and telemetry decoding. Prior to version 0.4.13, the unauthenticated save-waterfall-snapshot Socket.IO command passes attacker-controlled snapshotName input from backend/handlers/entities/sdr.py to backend/server/snapshots.py, where os.path.join permits an absolute path or parent-directory traversal and writes attacker-controlled base64-decoded bytes outside backend/data/snapshots. An attacker can write a logging YAML file containing a logging.config.dictConfig callable factory, use the unauthenticated update-app-config operation to set log_config to that file, and invoke restart_service. During restart, backend/common/logger.py passes the YAML through resolve_log_config_path(), yaml.safe_load(), and logging.config.dictConfig(), which executes the factory with service privileges and can also cause a persistent crash loop. This issue is fixed in version 0.4.13.

Affected products

• sgoudelis ground-station: before 0.4.13

References

• https://github.com/sgoudelis/ground-station/commit/5649905f1021155933463a54a76030924adffb9d
• https://github.com/sgoudelis/ground-station/releases/tag/v0.4.13
• https://github.com/sgoudelis/ground-station/security/advisories/GHSA-q35x-w3h6-36w8
• https://github.com/sgoudelis/ground-station/security/advisories/GHSA-q35x-w3h6-36w8

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