Vulnerability Database

346,505

Total vulnerabilities in the database

CVE-2023-45283 — golang / go

Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory ('Path Traversal')

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.

  • Published: Nov 9, 2023
  • Updated: Nov 16, 2025
  • CVE: CVE-2023-45283
  • Severity: High
  • Exploit:

CVSS v3:

  • Severity: High
  • Score: 7.5
  • AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

Frequently Asked Questions

A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.

A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. In practice, risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.

Use a simple, repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress using consistent metrics so remediation is steady, not reactive.

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