CVE-2026-22871 — GuardDog Path Traversal Vulnerability Leads to Arbitrary File Overwrite and RCE

Affected: DataDog guarddog

GuardDog is a CLI tool to identify malicious PyPI packages. Prior to 2.7.1, there is a path traversal vulnerability exists in GuardDog's safe_extract() function that allows malicious PyPI packages to write arbitrary files outside the intended extraction directory, leading to Arbitrary File Overwrite and Remote Code Execution on systems running GuardDog. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.7.1.

GHSA-xg9w-vg3g-6m68 — GuardDog Path Traversal Vulnerability Leads to Arbitrary File Overwrite and RCE

Affected: PyPI: guarddog

## Summary

A **path traversal vulnerability** exists in GuardDog's `safe_extract()` function that allows malicious PyPI packages to write arbitrary files outside the intended extraction directory, leading to **Arbitrary File Overwrite** and **Remote Code Execution** on systems running GuardDog.

**CWE:** CWE-22 (Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory)

## Details

### Vulnerable Code

**File:** `guarddog/utils/archives.py`

```python elif zipfile.is_zipfile(source_archive): with zipfile.ZipFile(source_archive, "r") as zip: for file in zip.namelist(): # Note: zip.extract cleans up any malicious file name # such as directory traversal attempts This is not the # case of zipfile.extractall zip.extract(file, path=os.path.join(target_directory, file)) # ❌ VULNERABLE ```

### Root Cause

The comment about `zip.extract()` fooled me at first :) then I noticed the `os.path.join()` call. The vulnerability stems from **incorrect usage of Python's `zipfile.ZipFile.extract()` API**:

- The `path` parameter should be the **target directory**, not a full file path - `extract()` automatically appends the member name to the path - By passing `os.path.join(target_directory, file)`, GuardDog causes the filename to be appended **twice** - This breaks zipfile's built-in path traversal sanitization

### Attack Vector

1. Attacker creates malicious wheel with path traversal filenames 2. Uploads to PyPI or distribute…

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CVE-2026-22871 — GuardDog Path Traversal Vulnerability Leads to Arbitrary File Overwrite and RCE

GHSA-xg9w-vg3g-6m68 — GuardDog Path Traversal Vulnerability Leads to Arbitrary File Overwrite and RCE