A directory traversal attack was reported against libtar, a C library for manipulating tar archives. The application does not validate the filenames inside the tar archive, allowing to extract files in arbitrary path. An attacker can craft a tar file to override files beyond the tar_extract_glob and tar_extract_all prefix parameter.

For the oldstable distribution (squeeze), this problem has been fixed in version 1.2.11-6+deb6u2. For the stable distribution (wheezy), this problem has been fixed in version 1.2.16-1+deb7u2. For the unstable distribution (sid), this problem has been fixed in version 1.2.20-2. We recommend that you upgrade your libtar packages.

libtar allows programs to create, extract and test tar archives. It supports both the strict POSIX tar format and many of the commonly-used GNU extensions.

libtar on Debian Linux

This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.

• http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2863.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25