Bug 2521857 (CVE-2026-78367)

Summary: CVE-2026-78367 rpm: rpmbuild getTarSpec() crafted tar member name → macro injection
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: rhel-process-autobot, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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A vulnerability was found in RPM's rpmbuild tarball processing. When processing a crafted source archive, the getTarSpec() function in tools/rpmbuild.cc passes an attacker-controlled tar archive member name to rpmExpand() as part of a %{basename:...} macro expression. A specially crafted .spec member name can therefore inject RPM macros, including Lua expressions, resulting in arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the user running rpmbuild. This can be exploited when a victim or automated build system processes an attacker-controlled source tarball using rpmbuild tarball mode (such as -ts, -ta, or -tb).
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Bug Depends On: 2521902    
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-08-24 13:09:33 UTC
When rpmbuild runs in tarball mode (-ta / -tb / -ts, etc.), getTarSpec() extracts a .spec from the archive and renames it using the member name from tar’s verbose listing. That member name is concatenated into:

specFinal = rpmExpand("%{_specdir}/%{basename:", tarbuf, "}", NULL);

A crafted .spec member name containing } closes %{basename:...} early. Text after the } is expanded as further RPM macros, including %{lua:} (full Lua stdlib, rpm.execute / rpm.spawn). The expanded string is used as the destination of rename() and as the spec path for the rest of the build.

This happens while locating the spec — before %prep. It is not “spec scripts run shell by design.” The victim only needs to run rpmbuild -ts (or -ta / -tb) on a crafted tarball.

This is a sibling / variant of CVE-2026-44604: untrusted archive metadata (here: tar member name; there: ZIP/7z/GEM top-level directory) is interpolated into a privileged expand/popen path. Different call site (getTarSpec vs rpmuncompress), same trust-boundary class. CVE-2026-44604 did not fix this path.