Jim Meyering discovered that tar did not properly verify the validity of certain header fields in a GNU tar archive. By tricking an user into processing a specially crafted tar archive, this could be exploited to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user.
The tar version in Ubuntu 4.10 is not affected by this vulnerability.
23 February 2006
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Jim Meyering discovered that tar did not properly verify the validity of certain header fields in a GNU tar archive. By tricking an user into processing a specially crafted tar archive, this could be exploited to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user.
The tar version in Ubuntu 4.10 is not affected by this vulnerability.
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.
Vulmon