Description

NVIDIA OpenShell Sandbox for Linux contains a vulnerability where an attacker could cause a path traversal bypass of L7 REST network policy. A successful exploit of this vulnerability might lead to information disclosure and data tampering.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "8.5",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-25T21:17:29.177Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-25T21:17:29.177Z",
  "executiveSummary": "A critical path traversal vulnerability exists within the NVIDIA OpenShell Sandbox for Linux, impacting the L7 REST network policy enforcement mechanism.\nThe vulnerability allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to bypass established security boundaries by manipulating input paths to access unauthorized resources.\nSuccessful exploitation enables potential information disclosure of sensitive data and facilitates unauthorized data tampering within the sandboxed environment.\nThis flaw represents a significant security oversight in the policy validation logic, potentially allowing an attacker to navigate outside the intended filesystem or API scope.\nThe risk implication is high, as it undermines the isolation guarantees provided by the OpenShell Sandbox, allowing for potential lateral movement or unauthorized configuration changes within the constrained environment.\nExploitation requires the ability to reach the L7 REST interface, and the impact is contingent on the specific environment configuration and data accessibility within the sandbox.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability stems from an improper sanitization and validation failure within the L7 REST network policy handling component of the NVIDIA OpenShell Sandbox.\nSpecifically, the input parsing logic fails to adequately normalize or sanitize path strings before they are utilized in internal API routing or file access operations. This permits the inclusion of directory traversal sequences (e.g., '../') within incoming REST requests.\nThe attack flow initiates when an attacker crafts a malicious request targeting the L7 REST network policy endpoint. By embedding traversal characters into the URI or associated parameters, the attacker can manipulate the path resolution logic.\nBecause the system fails to verify that the requested path resides strictly within the authorized sandbox boundary, the application logic resolves these sequences to target unintended files or administrative endpoints that should have been restricted by the network policy.\nThis bypassing of L7 policy enforcement effectively negates the access control list (ACL) definitions intended to isolate the sandbox. Consequently, the attacker can trick the underlying services into performing operations on files or endpoints located outside the designated sandbox directory structure.\nThe vulnerable component is the L7 REST policy enforcement module, which resides between incoming network traffic and the sandbox internal services. The lack of strict input canonicalization ensures that path traversal payloads are processed as legitimate requests, allowing for unauthorized access.\nPost-exploitation impact is severe, as it facilitates unauthorized read access to internal configuration files, logs, or sensitive datasets (information disclosure), as well as the ability to overwrite or modify configuration files or application state (data tampering).\nThe vulnerability does not require prior authentication to the sandbox environment itself, as the entry point is the REST network policy interface, which is typically accessible to any network participant authorized to communicate with the service. The flaw persists until the input parser is hardened to reject or sanitize path traversal metadata before routing occurs."
}