NASA AMMOS Instrument Toolkit: Path traversal resulting in arbitrary file append (can be triggered over the network by unauthenticated attacker)
Date: 2026-06
Affected: pip/ait-core, pip/ait-core
Attack vector: path-traversal
Category: vulnerability-disclosure
Severity: Critical
CVE: CVE-2026-47731
CWE: CWE-22
CVSS: 9.1 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H)

## 1. Summary The Binary Stream Capture (BSC) component exposes an unauthenticated HTTP API for dynamically creating packet capture “handlers.” Because the code blindly trusts path‑related form fields, a remote client can: - **Bypass the configured log root** and direct BSC to log to **arbitrary filesystem paths** (path traversal / directory escape), and - **Append attacker‑controlled data** to those files, using the privileges of the`ait-bsc` process. There are two ways for a remote attacker to trigger this: 1. If the attacker has access to the network where `ait-bsc` is deployed (a reason for that could be that the ports are publicly accessible), the payloads can be directly sent to the server to trigger the arbitrary file append. This type of attack is demonstrated in `python_poc.py`. 2. Even if the attacker does not have direct access to the network because the software is running in a local network, it is possible to exploit this if a bad actor in that network opens an attacker-controlled website (which might be a website created by an attacker, or a third-party website compromised by the attacker). The browser javascript can automatically send the requests necessary to exploit this into the local network. This is even possible if the server is only accessible on `localhost`. This type of attack is demonstrated by `attacker_tcp.py` and `test1.html` (first launch the attacker TCP server, then start a webserver to host `test1.html`, for example using `python3 -m http.se


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):