Vulnerability · Published Aug 19, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M
CVE-2026-53451Ground Station: Unauthenticated arbitrary file write (path traversal) in save-waterfall-snapshot leads to remote code execution
Critical 9.8
In plain English
A critical-severity path traversal in ground-station from sgoudelis. Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 1.1% (higher than 65% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
Ground Station is a browser-based suite for satellite tracking, SDR reception, hardware control, and telemetry decoding. Prior to version 0.4.13, the unauthenticated save-waterfall-snapshot Socket.IO command passes attacker-controlled snapshotName input from backend/handlers/entities/sdr.py to backend/server/snapshots.py, where os.path.join permits an absolute path or parent-directory traversal and writes attacker-controlled base64-decoded bytes outside backend/data/snapshots. An attacker can write a logging YAML file containing a logging.config.dictConfig callable factory, use the unauthenticated update-app-config operation to set log_config to that file, and invoke restart_service. During restart, backend/common/logger.py passes the YAML through resolve_log_config_path(), yaml.safe_load(), and logging.config.dictConfig(), which executes the factory with service privileges and can also cause a persistent crash loop. This issue is fixed in version 0.4.13.
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| sgoudelis | ground-station | < 0.4.13 |
Weakness: CWE-22, CWE-73, CWE-94 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H