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OpenAdvisories
Medium · 6.5 CVE-2026-40491 EUVD-2026-23642GHSA-76hw-p97h-883fPYSEC-2026-2158

gdown Affected by Arbitrary File Write via Path Traversal in gdown.extractall

Published Apr 18, 2026 · Updated Apr 20, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

gdown is a Google Drive public file/folder downloader. Versions prior to 5.2.2 are vulnerable to a Path Traversal attack within the extractall functionality. When extracting a maliciously crafted ZIP or TAR archive, the library fails to sanitize or validate the filenames of the archive members. This allow files to be written outside the intended destination directory, potentially leading to arbitrary file overwrite and Remote Code Execution (RCE). Version 5.2.2 contains a fix.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
wkentaro gdown < 5.2.2 —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian 14 gdown 6.0.0+dfsg-1 —
Debian 13 gdown 5.2.0+dfsg-2+deb13u1 —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 gdown No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS gdown No fix yet —
Ubuntu 25.10 gdown No fix yet —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
PyPI gdown < 5.2.2 5.2.2 GHSA-76hw-p97h-883f

References