A heap-based buffer overflow flaw was found in the way tar and cpio archive manipulation tools expanded archives with certain character in the archive name. If a local user was tricked into expanding a specially-crafted archive, it could cause the tar, cpio executables to crash or, potentially, to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the utility.
Link to advisory: [1] http://www.agrs.tu-berlin.de/index.php?id=78327
Acknowledgements:
Red Hat would like to thank Jakob Lell for responsibly reporting this issue.
Race condition in cpio 2.6 and earlier allows local users to modify permissions of arbitrary files via a hard link attack on a file while it is being decompressed, whose permissions are changed by cpio after the decompression is complete.
Directory traversal vulnerability in cpio 2.6 and earlier allows remote attackers to write to arbitrary directories via a .. (dot dot) in a cpio file.