GHSA-4rx4-4r3x-6534

Summary

PraisonAI's recipe registry pull flow extracts attacker-controlled .praison tar archives with tar.extractall() and does not validate archive member paths before extraction. A malicious publisher can upload a recipe bundle that contains ../ traversal entries and any user who later pulls that recipe will write files outside the output directory they selected.

This is a path traversal / arbitrary file write vulnerability on the client side of the recipe registry workflow. It affects both the local registry pull path and the HTTP registry pull path. The checksum verification does not prevent exploitation because the malicious traversal payload is part of the signed bundle itself.

Details

The issue is caused by unsafe extraction of tar archive contents during recipe pull.

1. A malicious publisher creates a valid .praison bundle whose manifest.json is benign enough to pass publish, but whose tar members include traversal entries such as:

../../escape-http.txt

2. LocalRegistry.publish() in src/praisonai/praisonai/recipe/registry.py:214-287 only reads manifest.json, calculates a checksum, and stores the uploaded bundle. It does not inspect or sanitize the rest of the tar members before saving the archive.

3. When a victim later pulls the recipe from a local registry, LocalRegistry.pull() in src/praisonai/praisonai/recipe/registry.py:289-345 extracts the tarball directly:

recipe_dir = output_dir / name
recipe_dir.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)

with tarfile.open(bundle_path, "r:gz") as tar:
    tar.extractall(recipe_dir)

4. The HTTP client path is also vulnerable. HttpRegistry.pull() in src/praisonai/praisonai/recipe/registry.py:691-739 downloads the bundle and then performs the same unsafe extraction:

recipe_dir = output_dir / name
recipe_dir.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)

with tarfile.open(bundle_path, "r:gz") as tar:
    tar.extractall(recipe_dir)

5. Because no archive...