Grav CMS CVE-2026-72697

Exploitation requires an authenticated session with page authoring (contributor or editor-level) privileges within Grav CMS - the CVSS PR:L metric confirms that low-privilege authentication is necessary, and unauthenticated exploitation is not possible. The attacker must have write access to page templates or content that invokes the media_directory() Twig function with attacker-controlled path arguments; installations where authors are restricted to content-only editing without template access are not exploitable. File contents are accessible only for files whose extensions match the CMS's configured media extension allow-list, which constrains (but does not eliminate) the set of exfiltrable files - the specific risk depends on which extensions are enabled in the target deployment. Exploitation is further bounded by the OS-level file permissions of the web server process; files owned exclusively by root or other non-web-server accounts are out of scope. Grav instances that sandbox or disable custom Twig function calls in author-facing templates would not be exploitable through this vector.

The CVSS 4.0 score of 7.1 (AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:H/VI:N/VA:N) accurately characterizes the risk profile: network-accessible exploitation against any Grav instance that exposes its authoring interface, low attack complexity, and high confidentiality impact. The PR:L requirement is the primary constraint - exploitation is limited to accounts holding page authoring (contributor or editor-level) privileges, ruling out unauthenticated attacks and making this a trusted-insider or compromised-account scenario rather than an opportunistic mass-exploitation risk. EPSS data was not provided in the source intelligence; no active exploitation signal exists (not in CISA KEV) and no public POC has been identified, suggesting this is a newly disclosed research finding rather than an actively targeted flaw. Despite the absence of active exploitation, the practical risk in multi-tenant Grav deployments or platforms that grant authoring access to external collaborators is real: sensitive configuration files, credential stores, or private keys accessible to the web server process and matching the media extension allow-list could be silently exfiltrated. The file extension constraint is a partial mitigating factor but is environment-dependent and does not reliably prevent exposure.

An attacker holding a contributor account on a Grav CMS site before 2.0.16 edits a page template to call media_directory('/var/www/html/../etc/') (or a similar traversal path) and then accesses the filepath property of the returned Medium object to read the contents of a target file - for example, a .yml configuration file containing database credentials or an API key that matches the media extension allow-list. The attack requires no special tooling beyond familiarity with Grav's Twig templating syntax, and because it executes server-side within the CMS rendering pipeline, it produces no obvious client-side indicators. No public proof-of-concept code has been identified at time of analysis.