tar-rs 0.4.11 - 0.4.46 Symlink Escape via append_dir_all()
tar-rs versions 0.4.11 through 0.4.46 contain a symlink escape vulnerability in the Builder::append_dir_all() function that allows attackers to read files outside the intended source root directory by planting symlinks in an attacker-controlled directory. When a privileged process archives an untrusted directory, the function follows symlinks without verifying that resolved targets remain within the source root, causing out-of-bounds files to be included in the archive as regular files and disclosed to the attacker.
tar-rs: unpack_in can chmod arbitrary directories by following symlinks
tar-rs is a tar archive reading/writing library for Rust. In versions 0.4.44 and below, when unpacking a tar archive, the tar crate's unpack_dir function uses fs::metadata() to check whether a path that already exists is a directory. Because fs::metadata() follows symbolic links, a crafted tarball containing a symlink entry followed by a directory entry with the same name causes the crate to treat the symlink target as a valid existing directory — and subsequently apply chmod to it. This allows an attacker to modify the permissions of arbitrary directories outside the extraction root. This issue has been fixed in version 0.4.45.
tar-rs incorrectly ignores PAX size headers if header size is nonzero
tar-rs is a tar archive reading/writing library for Rust. Versions 0.4.44 and below have conditional logic that skips the PAX size header in cases where the base header size is nonzero. As part of CVE-2025-62518, the astral-tokio-tar project was changed to correctly honor PAX size headers in the case where it was different from the base header. This is almost the inverse of the astral-tokio-tar issue. Any discrepancy in how tar parsers honor file size can be used to create archives that appear differently when unpacked by different archivers. In this case, the tar-rs (Rust tar) crate is an outlier in checking for the header size - other tar p
An issue was discovered in the tar crate before 0.4.36 for Rust. When symlinks are present in a TAR archive, extraction can create arbitrary directories via .. traversal.