CVE-2023-45283 - CVE House
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Status published Unknown CVE-2023-45283

Insecure parsing of Windows paths with a \??\ prefix in path/filepath

Vulnerability Description

The filepath package does not recognize paths with a \??\ prefix as special. On Windows, a path beginning with \??\ is a Root Local Device path equivalent to a path beginning with \\?\. Paths with a \??\ prefix may be used to access arbitrary locations on the system. For example, the path \??\c:\x is equivalent to the more common path c:\x. Before fix, Clean could convert a rooted path such as \a\..\??\b into the root local device path \??\b. Clean will now convert this to .\??\b. Similarly, Join(\, ??, b) could convert a seemingly innocent sequence of path elements into the root local device path \??\b. Join will now convert this to \.\??\b. In addition, with fix, IsAbs now correctly reports paths beginning with \??\ as absolute, and VolumeName correctly reports the \??\ prefix as a volume name. UPDATE: Go 1.20.11 and Go 1.21.4 inadvertently changed the definition of the volume name in Windows paths starting with \?, resulting in filepath.Clean(\?\c:) returning \?\c: rather than \?\c:\ (among other effects). The previous behavior has been restored.

Impact Analysis

Refer to official advisory for detailed impact metrics.

Remediation

Ensure systems are updated to the latest vendor-supplied patch levels.

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Credits & Attribution

No credits recorded in the NVD database.

Affected Vendor

Go standard library

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Affected Software

path/filepath, internal/safefilepath
Vulnerable Versions:
0, 1.21.0-0, 1.20.11, 1.21.4

Timeline

Official Publish: November 9th, 2023
Last Modified: February 13th, 2025
Added to House: July 22nd, 2026

CVSS Vectors

No vector data available

Weaknesses (CWE)

No CWE data available

MITRE ATT&CK TTPs

No associated TTPs found for this vulnerability.