Updated tar package that fixes a path traversal flaw is now available. This update has been rated as having moderate security impact by the CentOS Security Response Team.
The GNU tar program saves many files together in one archive and can restore individual files (or all of the files) from that archive. A path traversal flaw was discovered in the way GNU tar extracted archives. A malicious user could create a tar archive that could write to arbitrary files to which the user running GNU tar had write access. (CVE-2007-4131) CentOS would like to thank Dmitry V. Levin for reporting this issue. Users of tar should upgrade to this updated package, which contains a replacement backported patch to correct this issue.
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