CVE-2026-40090: lfprojects zarf Path Traversal

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-40090 is a high (CVSS 7.1) Path Traversal vulnerability in lfprojects zarf. EPSS estimates a 0.39% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 31.2% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 14-04-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 15-04-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

Zarf is an Airgap Native Packager Manager for Kubernetes. Versions 0.23.0 through 0.74.1 contain an arbitrary file write vulnerability in the zarf package inspect sbom and zarf package inspect documentation subcommands. These subcommands output file paths are constructed by joining a user-controlled output directory with the package's Metadata.Name field read directly from the untrusted package's zarf.yaml manifest. Although Metadata.Name is validated against a regex on package creation, an attacker can unarchive a package to modify the Metadata.Name field to contain path traversal sequences such as ../../etc/cron.d/malicious or absolute paths like /home/user/.ssh/authorized_keys, along with the corresponding files inside SBOMS.tar. This allows writing attacker-controlled content to arbitrary filesystem locations within the permissions of the user running the inspect command. This issue has been fixed in version 0.74.2.

• CWE-22Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory ('Path Traversal')The product uses external input to construct a pathname that is intended to identify a file or directory that is located underneath a restricted parent directory, but the product does not properly neutralize special elements within the pathname that can cause the pathname to resolve to a location that is outside of the restricted directory.