Technical Description

Multiple vulnerabilities have been identified in Libarchive, which could be exploited by attackers to cause a denial of service or execute arbitrary code.

The first issue is caused by an infinite loop when handling an archive that prematurely ends within a pax extension header or when certain types of corruption occur in pax extension headers, which could be exploited by attackers to create a denial of service condition.

The second vulnerability is caused by a NULL pointer dereference when handling an archive that prematurely ends within a tar header immediately following a pax extension header or when certain other types of corruption occur in pax extension headers, which could be exploited by attackers to crash an affected application, creating a denial of service condition.

The third issue buffer overflow error when processing a malformed pax extension header, which could be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary code via a specially crafted archive.

Affected Products

libarchive versions prior to 2.2.4

Solution

Upgrade to libarchive version 2.2.4 :
http://people.freebsd.org/~kientzle/libarchive/src/libarchive-2.2.4.tar.gz

References

http://www.vupen.com/english/advisories/2007/2521
http://people.freebsd.org/~kientzle/libarchive/

Credits

Vulnerabilities reported by CPNI, CERT-FI, Tim Kientzle and Colin Percival.

ChangeLog

2007-07-13 : Initial release

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