critical

CVE-2026-40576

excel-mcp-server has a Path Traversal issue

Published 21 Apr 2026Modified 26 Oct 2026CWE 22

In the Trivy database since at least 24 Oct 2026, 07:11 UTCWhen it arrived before that build is not recorded.

Severity by source

GHSA9.4CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:H/A:H

Trivy's own label is CRITICAL. Rated critical by GHSA.

Description

excel-mcp-server is a Model Context Protocol server for Excel file manipulation. A path traversal vulnerability exists in excel-mcp-server versions up to and including 0.1.7. When running in SSE or Streamable-HTTP transport mode (the documented way to use this server remotely), an unauthenticated attacker on the network can read, write, and overwrite arbitrary files on the host filesystem by supplying crafted filepath arguments to any of the 25 exposed MCP tool handlers. The server is intended to confine file operations to a directory set by the EXCEL_FILES_PATH environment variable. The function responsible for enforcing this boundary — get_excel_path() — fails to do so due to two independent flaws: it passes absolute paths through without any check, and it joins relative paths without resolving or validating the result. Combined with zero authentication on the default network-facing transport and a default bind address of 0.0.0.0 (all interfaces), this allows trivial remote exploitation. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.1.8.

Affected packages and fixed versions

Source	Package	Fixed in
pip::GitHub Security Advisory pip	excel-mcp-server	0.1.8

References

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