USN-257-1: tar vulnerability

23 February 2006

tar vulnerability

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Releases

Details

Jim Meyering discovered that tar did not properly verify the validity
of certain header fields in a GNU tar archive. By tricking an user
into processing a specially crafted tar archive, this could be
exploited to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user.

The tar version in Ubuntu 4.10 is not affected by this vulnerability.

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Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 5.10
  • tar -
Ubuntu 5.04
  • tar -

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

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Further reading