It was discovered cpio does not properly validate input files when generating TAR archives. When cpio is used to create TAR archives from paths an attacker can write to, the resulting archive may contain files with permissions the attacker did not have or in paths he did not have access to. Extracting those archives from a high-privilege user without carefully reviewing them may lead to the compromise of the system.
TAR archives should be inspected before being extracted and the extraction should be performed with the tar
command or --no-absolute-filenames
option if done with cpio
. Moreover, it should be performed by a low-privilege user whenever possible, to prevent extraction of files that could compromise the system.