Drupal fixed a new flaw related PEAR Archive_Tar library

Pierluigi Paganini January 22, 2021

Drupal development team released security updates to address a vulnerability that resides in the PEAR Archive_Tar third-party library.

The Drupal development team has released security updates to address the CVE-2020-36193 vulnerability in the PEAR Archive_Tar third-party library.

The PEAR Archive_Tar class provides handling of tar files in PHP. It supports creating, listing, extracting, and adding to tar files.

The developers released core patches for the version 9.1, 9.0, 8.9, and 7 of the popular CMS.

The CVE-2020-36193 flaw is caused by the improper check of symbolic links, leading to Tar.php in Archive_Tar allowing for write operations with directory traversal.

“The Drupal project uses the pear Archive_Tar library, which has released a security update that impacts Drupal.” reads the advisory.

The flaw could be exploited by attackers if the CMS is configured to allow for the upload and processing of .tar, .tar.gz, .bz2, or .tlz files.

The flaw affects Archive_Tar through version 1.4.11, the issue was fixed by disallowing symlinks to out-of-path filenames.

According to the advisory published by Drupal, the flaw could be mitigated by disabling uploads of .tar, .tar.gz, .bz2, or .tlz files.

The development team recommends to install the latest version

  • If you are using version 9.1, update to Drupal 9.1.3.
  • If you are using version 9.0, update to Drupal 9.0.11.
  • If you are using version 8.9, update to 8.9.13.
  • If you are using version 7, update to 7.78.

Versions of Drupal 8 prior to 8.9.x are end-of-life and do not receive security coverage.

The CVE-2020-36193 vulnerability is linked to the CVE-2020-28948 flaw that was fixed by the developers in November with the release of emergency security updates.

If you want to receive the weekly Security Affairs Newsletter for free subscribe here.

[adrotate banner=”9″][adrotate banner=”12″]

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking)

[adrotate banner=”5″]

[adrotate banner=”13″]



you might also like

leave a comment