Bug 2569205

Summary: CVE-2026-118485 axel: axel: Arbitrary file write via directory traversal in URL path [fedora-all]
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Laura Pardo <lpardo>
Component: axelAssignee: Mosaab Alzoubi <moceap>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: high    
Version: rawhideCC: moceap
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security, SecurityTracking
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard: {"flaws": ["a08ab4ba-1b22-4640-8f55-eef507504784"]}
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: ---
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Documentation: --- CRM:
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
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Bug Depends On:    
Bug Blocks: 2568431    

Description Laura Pardo 2026-11-09 16:01:28 UTC 
Disclaimer: Community trackers are created by Red Hat Product Security team on a best effort basis. Package maintainers are required to ascertain if the flaw indeed affects their package, before starting the update process.

Axel Download Accelerator 2.17.14 and earlier performs URL percent-decoding (http_decode()) on the output filename after the URL has been parsed and the filename component extracted. This allows an attacker to embed %2e%2e%2f (URL-encoded ../) sequences in the URL path. These sequences survive the URL parser intact (they contain no literal / characters) but are decoded into directory traversal sequences before the output file is opened for writing. As a result, a crafted URL can cause axel to write downloaded content to arbitrary filesystem paths relative to the current working directory.