*** This bug has been split off bug 145720 ***

------- Original comment by Josh Bressers (Security Response Team) on 2005.01.20
16:32 -------

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.