GNU gzip contains a vulnerability in the gzexe utility related to insecure temporary file handling. When the mktemp utility is not available in the user’s PATH, gzexe falls back to constructing a temporary file path based solely on the process ID (PID). This predictable filename is created without exclusive access or existence checks. A local attacker can pre‑create the predicted temporary file path as a symbolic link pointing to an arbitrary file writable by the victim. When gzexe runs, it follows the symlink and overwrites the target file, resulting in a time‑of‑check to time‑of‑use (TOCTOU) condition that allows arbitrary file overwrite.

znew in the gzip package allows local users to overwrite arbitrary files via a symlink attack on temporary files.

gzip before 1.3 in Solaris 8, when called with the -f or -force flags, will change the permissions of files that are hard linked to the target files, which allows local users to view or modify these files.

The (1) gzexe, (2) zdiff, and (3) znew scripts in the gzip package, as used by other packages such as ncompress, allows local users to overwrite files via a symlink attack on temporary files. NOTE: the znew vulnerability may overlap CVE-2003-0367.

Race condition in gzip 1.2.4, 1.3.3, and earlier, when decompressing a gzipped file, 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 gzip after the decompression is complete.