phacility/phabricator · error · Exception

String "%s" is invalid in path specification "%s".

Error message

String "%s" is invalid in path specification "%s".

What it means

Before normalizing the repository path, the workflow rejects any URI path containing '/../'. This is a path-traversal guard: SVN itself may cope with dot-dot segments, but Phabricator refuses them so a client cannot address anything outside the repository namespace while the URL path is mapped to a repository.

Source

Thrown at src/applications/diffusion/ssh/DiffusionSubversionServeSSHWorkflow.php:379

  }

  private function getPathFromSubversionURI($uri_string) {
    $uri = new PhutilURI($uri_string);

    $proto = $uri->getProtocol();
    if ($proto !== 'svn+ssh') {
      throw new Exception(
        pht(
          'Protocol for URI "%s" MUST be "%s".',
          $uri_string,
          'svn+ssh'));
    }
    $path = $uri->getPath();

    // Subversion presumably deals with this, but make sure there's nothing
    // sketchy going on with the URI.
    if (preg_match('(/\\.\\./)', $path)) {
      throw new Exception(
        pht(
          'String "%s" is invalid in path specification "%s".',
          '/../',
          $uri_string));
    }

    $path = $this->normalizeSVNPath($path);

    return $path;
  }

  private function makeInternalURI($uri_string) {
    if ($this->isProxying) {
      return $uri_string;
    }

    $uri = new PhutilURI($uri_string);

View on GitHub (pinned to 5720a38cfe)

Solutions

1. Clean the URL: reference the repository by its canonical path/callsign with no '..' segments
2. Fix scripts that assemble checkout paths via relative joins
3. Treat unexpected occurrences as probing of the instance and review access logs

if (preg_match('(/\\.\\./)', $path)) {
  throw new Exception('Reject ../ segments before mapping to a repository.');
}

When it happens

Trigger: A URL like svn+ssh://host/../../elsewhere crafted manually; client or tunnel rewriting that inserts relative segments; fuzzed input sent at the SSH endpoint.

Common situations: Security scanners probing the SSH service; scripts building checkout URLs by naive concatenation; users trying to reach a sibling repository with '..' segments.

Related errors

• When creating a new Almanac service via the Conduit API, you
• Provide a public key, not a private key!
• Invalid response token for this challenge: token digest does
• Request includes restricted parameter "%s", but this control
• Mercurial command appears to contain unsafe injected "--conf

AI-assisted analysis of phacility/phabricator@5720a38cfe (2026-08-21). Data as JSON: /api/errors/8c7485618d813db7. Report an issue: GitHub.