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Case study · NVIDIA RAG Blueprint · AI infrastructure
NVIDIA RAG Blueprint

Path traversal in NVIDIA's RAG Blueprint MCP server

NVIDIA's RAG Blueprint shipped an MCP server that read user-supplied file paths with no validation. Any client could read arbitrary files and ingest them into the RAG collection.

Surface
MCP server
Class
CWE-22
Severity
High
Type
Research

The system

The RAG Blueprint is NVIDIA's reference architecture for retrieval-augmented generation. Its MCP server lets agents upload documents into the pipeline, reading each path from disk before forwarding the contents. It bound to 0.0.0.0:8000 with no authentication.

The finding

Both upload tools passed file paths straight to open() with no checks. A client could supply ../../../../etc/passwd, have it ingested into the RAG collection, then read it back through the model. A filesystem read laundered into natural-language answers.

The fix

Path validation that canonicalises each path with os.path.realpath() and rejects anything outside a configurable base directory.

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