Tar

GNU Tar through 1.35 allows file overwrite via directory traversal in crafted TAR archives, with a certain two-step process. First, the victim must extract an archive that contains a ../ symlink to a critical directory. Second, the victim must extract an archive that contains a critical file, specified via a relative pathname that begins with the symlink name and ends with that critical file's name. Here, the extraction follows the symlink and overwrites the critical file. This bypasses the protection mechanism of "Member name contains '..'" that would occur for a single TAR archive that attempted to specify the critical file via a ../ approach. For example, the first archive can contain "x -> ../../../../../home/victim/.ssh" and the second archive can contain x/authorized_keys. This can affect server applications that automatically extract any number of user-supplied TAR archives, and were relying on the blocking of traversal. This can also affect software installation processes in which "tar xf" is run more than once (e.g., when installing a package can automatically install two dependencies that are set up as untrusted tarballs instead of official packages). NOTE: the official GNU Tar manual has an otherwise-empty directory for each "tar xf" in its Security Rules of Thumb; however, third-party advice leads users to run "tar xf" more than once into the same directory.

Published: 2025-07-11T00:00:00.000Z
Updated: 2025-11-02T00:12:55.951Z

In GNU tar before 1.35, mishandled extension attributes in a PAX archive can lead to an application crash in xheader.c.

Published: 2024-03-27T00:00:00.000Z
Updated: 2025-11-04T18:16:37.208Z

GNU Tar through 1.34 has a one-byte out-of-bounds read that results in use of uninitialized memory for a conditional jump. Exploitation to change the flow of control has not been demonstrated. The issue occurs in from_header in list.c via a V7 archive in which mtime has approximately 11 whitespace characters.

Published: 2023-01-30T00:00:00.000Z
Updated: 2025-03-27T20:35:03.448Z

A flaw was found in the src/list.c of tar 1.33 and earlier. This flaw allows an attacker who can submit a crafted input file to tar to cause uncontrolled consumption of memory. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to system availability.

Published: 2021-03-26T16:41:23.000Z
Updated: 2024-08-03T17:30:07.480Z

pax_decode_header in sparse.c in GNU Tar before 1.32 had a NULL pointer dereference when parsing certain archives that have malformed extended headers.

Published: 2019-03-22T07:06:44.000Z
Updated: 2025-08-06T21:12:33.535Z