RHEL 6 : libarchive (RHSA-2016:1850)

high Nessus Plugin ID 93451

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Synopsis

The remote Red Hat host is missing one or more security updates.

Description

An update for libarchive is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Important. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE link(s) in the References section.

The libarchive programming library can create and read several different streaming archive formats, including GNU tar, cpio and ISO 9660 CD-ROM images. Libarchive is used notably in the bsdtar utility, scripting language bindings such as python-libarchive, and several popular desktop file managers.

Security Fix(es) :

* A flaw was found in the way libarchive handled hardlink archive entries of non-zero size. Combined with flaws in libarchive's file system sandboxing, this issue could cause an application using libarchive to overwrite arbitrary files with arbitrary data from the archive. (CVE-2016-5418)

* Multiple out-of-bounds read flaws were found in libarchive.
Specially crafted AR or MTREE files could cause the application to read data out of bounds, potentially disclosing a small amount of application memory, or causing an application crash. (CVE-2015-8920, CVE-2015-8921)

* A denial of service vulnerability was found in libarchive's handling of GZIP streams. A crafted GZIP file could cause libarchive to allocate an excessive amount of memory, eventually leading to a crash.
(CVE-2016-7166)

* A denial of service vulnerability was found in libarchive. A specially crafted CPIO archive containing a symbolic link to a large target path could cause memory allocation to fail, causing an application using libarchive that attempted to view or extract such archive to crash. (CVE-2016-4809)

* Multiple instances of undefined behavior due to arithmetic overflow were found in libarchive. Specially crafted Compress streams or ISO9660 volumes could potentially cause the application to fail to read the archive, or to crash. (CVE-2015-8932, CVE-2016-5844)

Red Hat would like to thank Insomnia Security for reporting CVE-2016-5418.

Solution

Update the affected libarchive, libarchive-debuginfo and / or libarchive-devel packages.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 93451

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2016-1850.nasl

Version: 2.13

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 9/13/2016

Updated: 1/26/2026

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Nessus Agent, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 4.4

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 5

Temporal Score: 3.9

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2016-5418

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.5

Temporal Score: 6.7

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:P/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:libarchive-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:libarchive-debuginfo, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:6, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:libarchive

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list, Host/cpu

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 9/12/2016

Vulnerability Publication Date: 9/20/2016

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2015-8920, CVE-2015-8921, CVE-2015-8932, CVE-2016-4809, CVE-2016-5418, CVE-2016-5844, CVE-2016-7166

RHSA: 2016:1850

Detections

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