Edward Henriquez's podcast script for Decoded: The Cybersecurity Podcast explains the Path Traversal vulnerability from a hacker's perspective. This technique exploits weaknesses in web applications that allow users to specify file paths. By manipulating these paths with sequences like "../", attackers can navigate outside intended directories to access sensitive files such as configuration files, source code, and SSH keys. Henriquez also describes advanced methods to bypass common defenses, like double encoding and null byte injection. The script uses a real-world example of a GitHub Enterprise vulnerability to illustrate the impact and emphasizes that trusting user-supplied file paths is the root cause. Finally, it provides concrete defense strategies for developers, including input sanitization, path normalization, and restricting file access.

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