CVE-2023-7216: Cpio: extraction allows symlinks which enables remote command execution

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2024-02-05 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-59

Description

A path traversal vulnerability was found in the CPIO utility. This issue could allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to trick a user into opening a specially crafted archive. During the extraction process, the archiver could follow symlinks outside of the intended directory, which allows files to be written in arbitrary directories through symlinks.

Affected products

GNU cpio: all versions
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 7.0, 8.0, 9.0

References

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2023-7216
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2249901
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2023-7216
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2249901

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