tar-rs is a tar archive reading/writing library for Rust. Versions 0.4.44 and below have conditional logic that skips the PAX size header in cases where the base header size is nonzero. As part of CVE-2025-62518, the astral-tokio-tar project was changed to correctly honor PAX size headers in the case where it was different from the base header. This is almost the inverse of the astral-tokio-tar issue. Any discrepancy in how tar parsers honor file size can be used to create archives that appear differently when unpacked by different archivers. In this case, the tar-rs (Rust tar) crate is an outlier in checking for the header size - other tar parsers (including e.g. Go archive/tar) unconditionally use the PAX size override. This can affect anything that uses the tar crate to parse archives and expects to have a consistent view with other parsers. This issue has been fixed in version 0.4.45.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-62518
https://github.com/alexcrichton/tar-rs/security/advisories/GHSA-gchp-q4r4-x4ff
https://github.com/alexcrichton/tar-rs/commit/de1a5870e603758f430073688691165f21a33946
Published: 2026-03-20
Updated: 2026-03-20
Base Score: 6.4
Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:P
Severity: Medium
Base Score: 9.1
Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H
Severity: Critical
Base Score: 5.1
Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:L/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Severity: Medium
EPSS: 0.0004