The Poisoned Archives
Summary: Cisco Talos worked with libarchive maintainers to patch three severe bugs in the open-source library, which handles compressed file formats and is used widely across products. The flaws include a 7-Zip heap overflow triggered by a file with more than 42 folders, an mtree buffer overflow from an incorrectly coded bounds check, and a RAR Ppmd context issue where a zero dictionary_size leads to writes into a previous heap chunk.
Key Takeaway: Because libarchive sits inside the compressed-file handling of products across the industry, a single crafted archive can reach a heap overflow in software you already run - and Talos notes the attacker fully controls both the number of overflow bytes and their values.
Read the original at Cisco Talos ↗
- Topics
- Vulnerabilities & Patching
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