[Bug 1810241] Re: NULL dereference when decompressing specially crafted archives

[Sebastien Bacher]

** Changed in: tar (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided => High

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Title:
  NULL dereference when decompressing specially crafted archives

Status in tar package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Hi,

  Fuzzing tar with checksums disabled reveals a NULL pointer dereference
  when parsing certain archives that have malformed extended headers.
  This affects tar from (at least) Trusty, Bionic and Cosmic. I haven't
  tested Xenial's version.

  A test case with fixed checksums is attached. To avoid breaking
  anything that looks inside tar archives, I have converted it to text
  with xxd. To reproduce:

  $ xxd -r gnutar-crash.tar.txt gnutar-crash.tar
  $ tar Oxf gnutar-crash.tar 
  tar: Ignoring unknown extended header keyword 'GNU.sparse.minTr'
  tar: Malformed extended header: missing length
  Segmentation fault (core dumped)

  I have also attached a patch against the latest upstream git and
  against 1.30 (in Cosmic). This fixes the issue by detecting the null
  result before it is dereferenced.

  Regards,
  Daniel

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