humanfs: Recursive copy follows symlinked files and copies data from outside the source tree

Overview

Summary

@humanfs/node does not treat symlinks as a separate case during copy operations. A symlink placed inside an attacker-controlled source tree can make copyAll() read and copy the contents of any file readable by the process, even when that file is outside the directory being copied.

Details

The Node implementation exposes symlink state through list(), but copyAll() ignores it. During recursive copies, every non-directory entry is passed to copy(), which delegates to fs.promises.copyFile().

On Node, copyFile() dereferences symlinks. As a result, a symlink inside the copied tree is handled as if it were an ordinary file, and the destination receives the contents of the symlink target rather than a copy of the link itself.

That breaks the expected boundary of a directory copy. A caller can point copyAll() at a seemingly self-contained directory and still end up copying data from elsewhere on the host filesystem if the source tree contains attacker-supplied symlinks.

The same dereference behavior also affects copy() when the source path itself is a symlink.

PoC

import { NodeHfs } from "@humanfs/node";
import fs from "node:fs/promises";
import path from "node:path";
import os from "node:os";

const root = await fs.mkdtemp(path.join(os.tmpdir(), "humanfs-"));
const src = path.join(root, "src");
const dst = path.join(root, "dst");
const secret = path.join(root, "secret.txt");

await fs.mkdir(src);
await fs.writeFile(secret, "TOPSECRET");
await fs.symlink(secret, path.join(src, "link.txt"));

const hfs = new NodeHfs();
await hfs.copyAll(src, dst);

console.log(await fs.readFile(path.join(dst, "link.txt"), "utf8"));
// TOPSECRET

Impact

If an application uses copyAll() or copy() on attacker-controlled paths, a symlink can be used to pull arbitrary readable host files into the copied output. In practice, that can turn a normal workspace copy, export, or packaging step into a file disclosure primitive.

Affected packages

• @humanfs/node < 0.16.8

Remediation

Upgrade to a patched release:

• @humanfs/node 0.16.8