GNU tar: Buffer overflow

Background

GNU tar is the standard GNU utility for creating and manipulating tar archives, a common format used for creating backups and distributing files on UNIX-like systems.

Description

Jim Meyering discovered a flaw in the handling of certain header fields that could result in a buffer overflow when extracting or listing the contents of an archive.

Impact

A remote attacker could construct a malicious tar archive that could potentially execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running GNU tar.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All GNU tar users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-arch/tar-1.15.1-r1"