CVE-2025-45582 Path traversal in Tar

What is CVE-2025-45582?

CVE-2025-45582 is a medium-severity path traversal vulnerability in GNU Tar, published on 11 Jul 2025. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

GNU Tar through 1.35 allows file overwrite via directory traversal in crafted TAR archives, with a certain two-step process. First, the victim must extract an archive that contains a ../ symlink to a critical directory. Second, the victim must extract an archive that contains a critical file, specified via a relative pathname that begins with the symlink name and ends with that critical file's name. Here, the extraction follows the symlink and overwrites the critical file. This bypasses the protection mechanism of "Member name contains '..'" that would occur for a single TAR archive that attempted to specify the critical file via a ../ approach. For example, the first archive can contain "x -> ../../../../../home/victim/.ssh" and the second archive can contain x/authorized_keys. This can affect server applications that automatically extract any number of user-supplied TAR archives, and were relying on the blocking of traversal. This can also affect software installation processes in which "tar xf" is run more than once (e.g., when installing a package can automatically install two dependencies that are set up as untrusted tarballs instead of official packages). NOTE: the official GNU Tar manual has an otherwise-empty directory for each "tar xf" in its Security Rules of Thumb; however, third-party advice leads users to run "tar xf" more than once into the same directory.

Weakness: CWE-24

Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-45582?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Gnu Tar.

How do I fix CVE-2025-45582?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, and resolve every user-supplied path against an allowed base folder before opening it. More about Path traversal.

Is CVE-2025-45582 being exploited?

It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2025-45582 exists.

Other vulnerabilities in GNU Tar

• CVE-2005-2541 Privilege escalation in n/a Critical 10.0
• CVE-2019-9923 Null dereference in n/a High 7.5
• CVE-2016-6321 Path traversal in n/a High 7.5
• CVE-2007-4131 Path traversal in n/a Medium 6.8
• CVE-2023-39804 Denial of service in n/a Medium 6.2

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as ALSA-2026:0002, ALSA-2026:0067, AZL-65082, AZL-65538, BELL-CVE-2025-45582, CLSA-2026-1769513855 and 26 more.