libarchive could be made to crash or overwrite files.
It was discovered that the libarchive bsdcpio utility extracted absolute paths by default without using the –insecure flag, contrary to expectations. If a user or automated system were tricked into extracting cpio archives containing absolute paths, a remote attacker may be able to write to arbitrary files. (CVE-2015-2304)
25 March 2015
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
libarchive could be made to crash or overwrite files.
It was discovered that the libarchive bsdcpio utility extracted absolute paths by default without using the –insecure flag, contrary to expectations. If a user or automated system were tricked into extracting cpio archives containing absolute paths, a remote attacker may be able to write to arbitrary files. (CVE-2015-2304)
Fabian Yamaguchi discovered that libarchive incorrectly handled certain type conversions. A remote attacker could possibly use this issue to cause libarchive to crash, resulting in a denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. (CVE-2013-0211)
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.