CVEvulnerability

CVE-2021-37712

8.6 HIGH Published 2021-08-31 Modified 2026-06-17 Official page ↗
Status
Modified
Published
2021-08-31
Last modified
2026-06-17
Assigner
[email protected]
CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
8.2 HIGH — CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N
CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
8.6 HIGH — CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS 2.0 ([email protected])
4.4 MEDIUM — AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
Weaknesses
CWE-22, CWE-59

Description

The npm package "tar" (aka node-tar) before versions 4.4.18, 5.0.10, and 6.1.9 has an arbitrary file creation/overwrite and arbitrary code execution vulnerability. node-tar aims to guarantee that any file whose location would be modified by a symbolic link is not extracted. This is, in part, achieved by ensuring that extracted directories are not symlinks. Additionally, in order to prevent unnecessary stat calls to determine whether a given path is a directory, paths are cached when directories are created. This logic was insufficient when extracting tar files that contained both a directory and a symlink with names containing unicode values that normalized to the same value. Additionally, on Windows systems, long path portions would resolve to the same file system entities as their 8.3 "short path" counterparts. A specially crafted tar archive could thus include a directory with one form of the path, followed by a symbolic link with a different string that resolves to the same file system entity, followed by a file using the first form. By first creating a directory, and then replacing that directory with a symlink that had a different apparent name that resolved to the same entry in the filesystem, it was thus possible to bypass node-tar symlink checks on directories, essentially allowing an untrusted tar file to symlink into an arbitrary location and subsequently extracting arbitrary files into that location, thus allowing arbitrary file creation and overwrite. These issues were addressed in releases 4.4.18, 5.0.10 and 6.1.9. The v3 branch of node-tar has been deprecated and did not receive patches for these issues. If you are still using a v3 release we recommend you update to a more recent version of node-tar. If this is not possible, a workaround is available in the referenced GHSA-qq89-hq3f-393p.

Affected configurations

• npmjs tar (<= 4.4.17) • npmjs tar (>= 5.0.0 <= 5.0.9) • npmjs tar (>= 6.0.0 <= 6.1.8) • debian debian linux 10.0 • debian debian linux 11.0 • oracle graalvm 20.3.3 • oracle graalvm 21.2.0 • siemens sinec infrastructure network services (< 1.0.1.1)

Related

Weakness · CWE (2)

  • CWE-22 Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory weakness
  • CWE-59 Improper Link Resolution Before File Access weakness

References