What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-5917: Libarchive: off by one error in build_ustar_entry_name() at archive_write_set_format_pax.c

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.0 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-06-09 · updated 2026-09-01
• Weakness: CWE-787

Description

A vulnerability has been identified in the libarchive library. This flaw involves an 'off-by-one' miscalculation when handling prefixes and suffixes for file names. This can lead to a 1-byte write overflow. While seemingly small, such an overflow can corrupt adjacent memory, leading to unpredictable program behavior, crashes, or in specific circumstances, could be leveraged as a building block for more sophisticated exploitation. This bug affects libarchive versions prior to 3.8.0.

Affected products

• libarchive: before 3.8.0 — fixed in 3.8.0
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0
• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.18: 4.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: libarchive 3.8.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2025-5917
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2370874
• https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/pull/2588
• https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/releases/tag/v3.8.0

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