CVE-2026-9538

high

Published 2026-05-26 · Modified 2026-05-28

💬 Discuss on Community ✚ Propose mitigation

CVSS v3

7.5

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

7.5

Description

Archive::Tar versions before 3.10 for Perl allow memory exhaustion via attacker controlled entry size field in tar header. _read_tar() reads each entry's payload with $handle->read($$data, $block), where $block is derived from the entry's 12-byte size field in the tar header with no upper bound on that value. A crafted header declaring a multi-gigabyte size causes Perl to allocate a scalar of that size.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

83%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

OS impact

OS	Version	Status
debian	bookworm	affected
debian	bullseye	affected
debian	forky	affected
debian	sid	affected
debian	trixie	affected

Application impact

Vendor	Product	Versions	Fixed
archive\	\	`{"endExcluding":"3.10"}`	`3.10`

References

CWEs

CWE-789

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.