This is a very old issue. This message was posted to vendor-sec. GNU cpio -oO appears to generate files with 0666 regardless of the user's umask. This is true for both cpio 2.5 (RH, SuSE) and and the (surprisingly 3x) larger cpio 2.6, but I haven't had the chance to dig into the code yet or sync with the developers yet. (If anyone else can gets to it before me, by all means...) cpio has a need to toggle between a "0" umask and the original umask depending on what it is doing, and gets it wrong in this case. It's a long-known public issue in general -- earliest I can find a record of it goes back to 1996, when the BSD folks fixed it: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=bin/1391 and fixes against older GNU cpio were posted to gnu.utils.bugs by The Written Word folks: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/gnu.utils.bug/msg/4db088ee6031c9ec but it never seems to have gotten into newer GNU cpio versions.
This issue also affects RHEL2.1
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on the solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2005-080.html