Arbitrary File Write Affecting tar package, versions >=6.0.0 <6.1.9 >=5.0.0 <5.0.10 <4.4.18


0.0
high

Snyk CVSS

    Attack Complexity Low
    User Interaction Required
    Scope Changed
    Confidentiality High
    Integrity High

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS 0.11% (44th percentile)
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NVD
8.6 high
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SUSE
8.1 high
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Red Hat
8.1 high

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-JS-TAR-1579152
  • published 1 Sep 2021
  • disclosed 1 Sep 2021
  • credit ginkoid, chen-robert, JarLob

How to fix?

Upgrade tar to version 6.1.9, 5.0.10, 4.4.18 or higher.

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary File Write. node-tar aims to guarantee that any file whose location would be modified by a symbolic link is not extracted. This is, in part, achieved by ensuring that extracted directories are not symlinks. Additionally, in order to prevent unnecessary stat calls to determine whether a given path is a directory, paths are cached when directories are created.

This logic is insufficient when extracting tar files that contain two directories and a symlink with names containing unicode values that normalized to the same value. Additionally, on Windows systems, long path portions would resolve to the same file system entities as their 8.3 "short path" counterparts. A specially crafted tar archive can include directories with two forms of the path that resolve to the same file system entity, followed by a symbolic link with a name in the first form, lastly followed by a file using the second form. This leads to bypassing node-tar symlink checks on directories, essentially allowing an untrusted tar file to symlink into an arbitrary location and extracting arbitrary files into that location.

References