CVE-2026-43965: Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory

Path traversal vulnerability in Gleam's dependency management allows arbitrary directory deletion via malicious build/packages/packages.toml content.

Package keys read from build/packages/packages.toml by LocalPackages::read_from_disc are passed without validation to paths.build_packages_package(), which constructs a filesystem path by joining the project build directory with the attacker-controlled key. The resulting path is then passed to fs::delete_directory (which calls remove_dir_all). No check is performed to ensure the path remains within the intended build/packages/ directory. Both absolute paths and relative traversal sequences (e.g. ../) are accepted as package keys, allowing deletion of arbitrary directories.

An attacker who can cause a victim to run gleam deps download on a project containing a malicious build/packages/packages.toml (e.g. by committing the normally-gitignored file to a repository) can cause arbitrary directories on the victim's system to be recursively deleted.

This issue affects Gleam from 0.18.0-rc1 until 1.17.0.