When pip is installing and extracting a maliciously crafted wheel archive, files may be extracted outside the installation directory. The path traversal is limited to prefixes of the installation directory, thus isn't able to inject or overwrite executable files in typical situations.

When installing a package from a Mercurial VCS URL (ie "pip install hg+...") with pip prior to v23.3, the specified Mercurial revision could be used to inject arbitrary configuration options to the "hg clone" call (ie "--config"). Controlling the Mercurial configuration can modify how and which repository is installed. This vulnerability does not affect users who aren't installing from Mercurial.