What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-38185

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 4.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2021-08-08 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-190

Description

GNU cpio through 2.13 allows attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted pattern file, because of a dstring.c ds_fgetstr integer overflow that triggers an out-of-bounds heap write. NOTE: it is unclear whether there are common cases where the pattern file, associated with the -E option, is untrusted data.

Affected products

• GNU cpio: through 2.13

References

• https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/cpio.git/commit/?id=dd96882877721703e19272fe25034560b794061b
• https://github.com/fangqyi/cpiopwn
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2023/06/msg00007.html
• https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-cpio/2021-08/msg00000.html
• https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-cpio/2021-08/msg00002.html
• https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/cpio.git/commit/?id=dd96882877721703e19272fe25034560b794061b
• https://github.com/fangqyi/cpiopwn
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2023/06/msg00007.html
• https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-cpio/2021-08/msg00000.html
• https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-cpio/2021-08/msg00002.html

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