It was found that libreoffice before versions 6.0.7 and 6.1.3 was vulnerable to a directory traversal attack which could be used to execute arbitrary macros bundled with a document. An attacker could craft a document, which when opened by LibreOffice, would execute a Python method from a script in any arbitrary file system location, specified relative to the LibreOffice install location.

LibreOffice has a feature where documents can specify that pre-installed macros can be executed on various script events such as mouse-over, document-open etc. Access is intended to be restricted to scripts under the share/Scripts/python, user/Scripts/python sub-directories of the LibreOffice install. Protection was added, to address CVE-2018-16858, to avoid a directory traversal attack where scripts in arbitrary locations on the file system could be executed. However this new protection could be bypassed by a URL encoding attack. In the fixed versions, the parsed url describing the script location is correctly encoded before further processing. This issue affects: Document Foundation LibreOffice versions prior to 6.2.6.