CVE-2025-55214: Copier's safe template has filesystem write access outside destination path
Copier suggests that it’s safe to generate a project from a safe template, i.e. one that doesn’t use unsafe features like custom Jinja extensions which would require passing the --UNSAFE,--trust
flag. As it turns out, a safe template can currently write files outside the destination path where a project shall be generated or updated. This is possible when rendering a generated directory structure whose rendered path is either a relative parent path or an absolute path. Constructing such paths is possible using Copier’s builtin pathjoin
Jinja filter and its builtin _copier_conf.sep
variable, which is the platform-native path separator. This way, a malicious template author can create a template that overwrites arbitrary files (according to the user’s write permissions), e.g., to cause havoc.
References
Code Behaviors & Features
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