{"id":"CVE-2026-23950","url":"https://www.cyber-defence.io/tools/cve/CVE-2026-23950","generatedAt":"2026-10-28T02:55:39.859Z","title":"node-tar,a Tar for Node.js, has a race condition vulnerability in versions up to and including 7.5.3.","description":"node-tar,a Tar for Node.js, has a race condition vulnerability in versions up to and including 7.5.3. This is due to an incomplete handling of Unicode path collisions in the `path-reservations` system. On case-insensitive or normalization-insensitive filesystems (such as macOS APFS, In which it has been tested), the library fails to lock colliding paths (e.g., `ß` and `ss`), allowing them to be processed in parallel. This bypasses the library's internal concurrency safeguards and permits Symlink Poisoning attacks via race conditions. The library uses a `PathReservations` system to ensure that metadata checks and file operations for the same path are serialized. This prevents race conditions where one entry might clobber another concurrently. This is a Race Condition which enables Arbitrary File Overwrite. This vulnerability affects users and systems using node-tar on macOS (APFS/HFS+). Because of using `NFD` Unicode normalization (in which `ß` and `ss` are different), conflicting paths do not have their order properly preserved under filesystems that ignore Unicode normalization (e.g., APFS (in which `ß` causes an inode collision with `ss`)). This enables an attacker to circumvent internal parallelization locks (`PathReservations`) using conflicting filenames within a malicious tar archive. The patch in version 7.5.4 updates `path-reservations.js` to use a normalization form that matches the target filesystem's behavior (e.g., `NFKD`), followed by first `toLocaleLowerCase('en')` and then `toLocaleUpperCase('en')`. As a workaround, users who cannot upgrade promptly, and who are programmatically using `node-tar` to extract arbitrary tarball data should filter out all `SymbolicLink` entries (as npm does) to defend against arbitrary file writes via this file system entry name collision issue.","published":"2026-01-20T01:15:58.000Z","lastModified":"2026-08-24T13:17:37.000Z","status":"Modified","sourceIdentifier":"security-advisories@github.com","cvss":{"version":"3.1","score":5.9,"severity":"MEDIUM","vector":"CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N"},"cwe":["CWE-176","CWE-352","CWE-367"],"affected":["isaacs/tar"],"epss":{"score":0.00264,"percentile":0.18147,"date":"2026-10-26","history":[]},"kev":{"listed":false},"exploits":{"count":0,"verified":false,"firstPublished":null,"source":"Exploit-DB (https://gitlab.com/exploit-database/exploitdb)","entries":[]},"verdict":{"level":"low","text":"Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.26%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own."},"changes":[],"references":[{"url":"https://github.com/isaacs/node-tar/commit/3b1abfae650056edfabcbe0a0df5954d390521e6","tags":["Patch"],"source":"security-advisories@github.com"},{"url":"https://github.com/isaacs/node-tar/security/advisories/GHSA-r6q2-hw4h-h46w","tags":["Exploit","Mitigation","Vendor Advisory"],"source":"security-advisories@github.com"},{"url":"https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:18480","source":"0b0ca135-0b70-47e7-9f44-1890c2a1c46c"},{"url":"https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:18868","source":"0b0ca135-0b70-47e7-9f44-1890c2a1c46c"},{"url":"https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:2144","source":"0b0ca135-0b70-47e7-9f44-1890c2a1c46c"},{"url":"https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:2926","source":"0b0ca135-0b70-47e7-9f44-1890c2a1c46c"},{"url":"https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:6192","source":"0b0ca135-0b70-47e7-9f44-1890c2a1c46c"},{"url":"https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-23950","source":"0b0ca135-0b70-47e7-9f44-1890c2a1c46c"},{"url":"https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2431036","source":"0b0ca135-0b70-47e7-9f44-1890c2a1c46c"},{"url":"https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-23950.json","source":"0b0ca135-0b70-47e7-9f44-1890c2a1c46c"}],"sources":{"nvd":"https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-23950","epss":"https://www.first.org/epss/","kev":"https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog","exploitdb":"https://www.exploit-db.com/"},"licence":"CC BY 4.0 — link back to the CVE Explorer if you publish the results; upstream data remains subject to its own terms."}