Executive brief
A vulnerability exists in the elie mcp-project, a tool used for managing research papers and arXiv searches. An attacker can exploit a flaw in how the software handles search terms to write files to unauthorized locations on the host system. This could allow an attacker to overwrite important configuration files or clutter the system, potentially leading to data corruption or service instability.
Technical details
A path traversal vulnerability (CWE-22) exists in the `search_papers` function within `research_server.py` of elie mcp-project 0.1.0. The application takes a user-provided `topic` argument and uses it to construct a filesystem path using `os.path.join` without adequate sanitization. While the code replaces spaces with underscores and converts the string to lowercase, it fails to strip directory traversal sequences like `../`. An attacker can provide a crafted topic string to escape the intended `papers/` directory and write a `papers_info.json` file to arbitrary locations where the service account has write permissions. This is a local exploit that provides a file-write primitive. As of the advisory date, no official patch has been released.
Affected products
- elie mcp-project 0.1.0
Timeline
- 2026-04-10: disclosed: Vulnerability reported to the vendor via GitHub issue
- 2026-04-28: advisory: Vulnerability published on NVD/VulDB