gradleup/shadow · Security
Gradle Shadow: Zip Slip path traversal in ShadowCopyAction — no independent entry-name sanitization
- GHSA ID
- GHSA-rr8v-fxxf-c986
- CVE ID
- CVE-2026-75598
- Severity
- high
- Published
- Updated
- CVSS
- 8.1 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H
- CVSS v3
- 8.1 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H
Description
Summary
ShadowCopyAction in the Shadow plugin does not validate or sanitize ZIP entry names before writing them to the output fat JAR. A malicious upstream dependency containing path traversal sequences (e.g. ../../../../tmp/pwned.txt) in entry names will have those entries reproduced verbatim in the output shadow JAR.
Details
The vulnerability exists because Shadow relies entirely on Gradle's ZipFileTree for entry sanitization rather than implementing its own path validation. This means:
- Users on Gradle < 7.6.2 / 8.x < 8.2.0 are directly exploitable
- The produced shadow JAR becomes a Zip Slip weapon against any downstream consumer using unprotected extraction (raw ZipInputStream, older CI tooling, custom Java unpackers)
- If Shadow ever uses a non-ZipFileTree code path, protection disappears silently
Affected file: src/main/kotlin/com/github/jengelman/gradle/plugins/shadow/internal/ShadowCopyAction.kt
PoC
- Create a malicious JAR with path traversal entry:
import zipfile
with zipfile.ZipFile('evil.jar', 'w') as zf:
zf.writestr('../../../../tmp/zipslip_proof.txt', 'pwned')
- Add as dependency in a shadow project
- Run
gradle shadowJar - Run
unzip -l build/libs/*.jar | grep "\.\." - Traversal entry survives in output JAR
Impact
Any tool extracting the shadow JAR with unprotected extraction is subject to arbitrary file overwrite. Users on older Gradle versions are directly vulnerable at build time.
CWEs
- CWE-22 · Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory
References
- https://github.com/GradleUp/shadow/security/advisories/GHSA-rr8v-fxxf-c986 ↗
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-75598 ↗
- https://github.com/GradleUp/shadow/commit/0c2744fcc050e34a084f5131d5e167b13c342bfd ↗
- https://github.com/GradleUp/shadow/releases/tag/9.6.0 ↗
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-rr8v-fxxf-c986 ↗