published September 24, 2025
astral-tokio-tar is a tar archive reading/writing library for async Rust. In versions 0.5.3 and earlier of astral-tokio-tar, tar archives may extract outside of their intended destination directory when using the Entry::unpack_in_raw API. Additionally, the Entry::allow_external_symlinks control (which defaults to true) could be bypassed via a pair of symlinks that individually point within the destination but combine to point outside of it. These behaviors could be used individually or combined to bypass the intended security control of limiting extraction to the given directory. This in turn would allow an attacker with a malicious tar archive to perform an arbitrary file write and potentially pivot into code execution. This issue has been patched in version 0.5.4. There is no workaround other than upgrading.