Vulnerability Advisory : astral-tokio-tar insufficiently validates PAX extensions during extraction with HIGH Attack Complexity

astral-tokio-tar is a tar archive reading/writing library for async Rust. In versions 0.5.6 and earlier, malformed PAX extensions were silently skipped when parsing tar archives. This silent skipping (rather than rejection) of invalid PAX extensions could be used as a building block for a parser differential, for example by silently skipping a malformed GNU “long link” extension so that a subsequent parser would misinterpret the extension. In practice, exploiting this behavior in astral-tokio-tar requires a secondary misbehaving tar parser, i.e. one that insufficiently validates malformed PAX extensions and interprets them rather than skipping or erroring on them. This vulnerability is considered low-severity as it requires a separate vulnerability against any unrelated tar parser. This issue has been fixed in version 0.6.0.