CVE-2018-20482

low
Published — · Modified —
CVSS v3
CVSS v4 NEW
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
2.5

Description

GNU Tar through 1.30, when --sparse is used, mishandles file shrinkage during read access, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (infinite read loop in sparse_dump_region in sparse.c) by modifying a file that is supposed to be archived by a different user's process (e.g., a system backup running as root).

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
Patch ETA

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

OS impact

suse SUSE Affected 1 release
VersionStatusFixed in
Affected
arch Arch Fixed 1 release
VersionStatusFixed in
Fixed 1.31-1
debian Debian Fixed 5 releases
VersionStatusFixed in
trixie Fixed 1.30+dfsg-3.1
sid Fixed 1.30+dfsg-3.1
forky Fixed 1.30+dfsg-3.1
bullseye Fixed 1.30+dfsg-3.1
bookworm Fixed 1.30+dfsg-3.1

References

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.