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.

GNU tar 1.16 and 1.15.1, and possibly other versions, allows user-assisted attackers to overwrite arbitrary files via a tar file that contains a GNUTYPENAMES record with a symbolic link, which is not properly handled by the extractarchive function in extract.c and extractmangle function in mangle.c, a variant of CVE-2002-1216.

Tar 1.15.1 does not properly warn the user when extracting setuid or setgid files, which may allow local users or remote attackers to gain privileges.

Buffer overflow in tar 1.14 through 1.15.90 allows user-assisted attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) and possibly execute code via unspecified vectors involving PAX extended headers.

Directory traversal vulnerability in the containsdotdot function in src/names.c in GNU tar allows user-assisted remote attackers to overwrite arbitrary files via certain //.. (slash slash dot dot) sequences in directory symlinks in a TAR archive.