Two heap-based buffer overflow flaws were found in the way libtar handled archives that use the GNU longname and longlink extensions. If a user were tricked into expanding a specially-crafted archive, it could cause the libtar executable or an application using libtar to crash or, potentially, execute arbitrary code.
Acknowledgements: Red Hat would like to thank Timo Warns for reporting this issue.
Upstream patch: http://repo.or.cz/w/libtar.git/commit/45448e8bae671c2f7e80b860ae0fc0cedf2bdc04 Public via: http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2013/q4/52
Created libtar tracking bugs for this issue: Affects: fedora-all [bug 1017507] Affects: epel-5 [bug 1017508]
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2013:1418 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2013-1418.html
libtar-1.2.11-25.fc18 has been pushed to the Fedora 18 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
libtar-1.2.11-26.fc19 has been pushed to the Fedora 19 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
libtar-1.2.11-14.el5 has been pushed to the Fedora EPEL 5 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
libtar-1.2.11-27.fc20 has been pushed to the Fedora 20 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.