Medium · published August 20, 2026
libgit2 is a portable C implementation of the Git core methods provided as a linkable library with a solid API, allowing to build Git functionality into your application. Prior to 1.8.6 and 1.9.5, libgit2 does not reject traversal components in a submodule path loaded from .gitmodules. The affected src/libgit2/submodule.c paths include git_submodule_lookup and git_submodule_add_setup. A crafted repository can specify a path such as ../escape-target, and applications that initialize the submodule can create directories outside the repository working tree. This issue is fixed in versions 1.8.6 and 1.9.5.