CVE-2021-20193

A flaw was found in the src/list.c of tar 1.33 and earlier. This flaw allows an attacker who can submit a crafted input file to tar to cause uncontrolled consumption of memory. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to system availability.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory.

Affected Software

Name	Vendor	Start Version	End Version
Tar	Gnu	*	1.33 (including)
Tar	Ubuntu	bionic	*
Tar	Ubuntu	devel	*
Tar	Ubuntu	esm-infra/xenial	*
Tar	Ubuntu	focal	*
Tar	Ubuntu	groovy	*
Tar	Ubuntu	hirsute	*
Tar	Ubuntu	impish	*
Tar	Ubuntu	jammy	*
Tar	Ubuntu	kinetic	*
Tar	Ubuntu	lunar	*
Tar	Ubuntu	precise/esm	*
Tar	Ubuntu	trusty	*
Tar	Ubuntu	trusty/esm	*
Tar	Ubuntu	upstream	*
Tar	Ubuntu	xenial	*

Potential Mitigations

Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

NVD	https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-20193
CWE	https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/401.html

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Weakness

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

References