CVE-2026-66484 PUBLISHED

Path Traversal in GNU cpio

Assigner: CERT-PL
Reserved: 27.07.2026 Published: 10.08.2026 Updated: 10.08.2026

GNU cpio contains a Path Traversal vulnerability in its tar archive extraction functionality. When extracting a tar archive in copy-in mode with the --no-absolute-filenames option, the extracted file name is normalized but the tar hard-link target is passed to the link_to_name function without equivalent sanitization before calling link function. A tar archive provided by an attacker, containing a hard-link entry whose linkname is set to an absolute path outside the extraction directory, can cause cpio to create a hard link to an existing file outside the intended extraction directory, breaking the expected guarantee of --no-absolute-filenames and allowing archive-controlled linkage to external files.

This issue has been fixed in commit e2b9cbdd3354d2b1569b7390d1bc15c1930559ad

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:N/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:L/SA:N
CVSS Score: 4.6

Product Status

Vendor GNU
Product cpio
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0 to 2.15 (incl.)

Credits

  • Michał Majchrowicz (AFINE Team) finder
  • Marcin Wyczechowski (AFINE Team) finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-22 Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory ('Path Traversal') CWE