In versions 0.4.44 and below of tar-rs, when unpacking a tar archive, the tar crate's unpack_dir function uses fs::metadata() to check whether a path that already exists is a directory. Because fs::metadata() follows symbolic links, a crafted tarball containing a symlink entry followed by a directory entry with the same name causes the crate to treat the symlink target as a valid existing directory — and subsequently apply chmod to it. This allows an attacker to modify the permissions of arbitrary directories outside the extraction root.

This issue has been fixed in version 0.4.45.

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, 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.