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USN-4692-1: tar vulnerabilities

13 January 2021

Several security issues were fixed in tar.

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Releases

Packages

  • tar - GNU version of the tar archiving utility

Details

Chris Siebenmann discovered that tar incorrectly handled extracting files
resized during extraction when invoked with the --sparse flag. An attacker
could possibly use this issue to cause a denial of service. This issue
only affected Ubuntu 12.04 ESM, Ubuntu 14.04 ESM, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. (CVE-2018-20482)

Daniel Axtens discovered that tar incorrectly handled certain malformed
tar files. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a
specially crafted tar archive, a remote attacker could use this issue to
cause tar to crash, resulting in a denial of service. (CVE-2019-9923)

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 20.10
Ubuntu 20.04
Ubuntu 18.04
Ubuntu 16.04
Ubuntu 14.04
Ubuntu 12.04

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.