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.