isaacs node-tar up to 7.5.15 Intermediary Extension interpretation conflict

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability was found in isaacs node-tar up to 7.5.15. It has been declared as problematic. Affected by this issue is some unknown functionality of the component Intermediary Extension. The manipulation results in interpretation conflict. This vulnerability is cataloged as CVE-2026-53655. The attack must be initiated from a local position. There is no exploit available. It is recommended to upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in isaacs node-tar up to 7.5.15. It has been classified as problematic. Affected is some unknown processing of the component Intermediary Extension. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a interpretation conflict vulnerability. CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-436. Product A handles inputs or steps differently than Product B, which causes A to perform incorrect actions based on its perception of B's state. This is going to have an impact on integrity. CVE summarizes:

node-tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js. Prior to 7.5.16, tar (node-tar) applies a PAX extended header's size= record (and other PAX overrides) to the next header entry of any type, including intermediary metadata headers such as a GNU long-name (L) or long-link (K) entry. Per POSIX pax, a PAX extended header (x) describes the next file entry, not the intermediary extension headers that may sit between the x header and the file it annotates. Because node-tar lets the PAX size override the byte length of an intervening L/K/x header, an attacker can desynchronize node-tar's stream cursor relative to every other mainstream tar implementation (GNU tar, libarchive/bsdtar, Python tarfile, and the now-fixed tar-rs / astral-tokio-tar). The result is a tar parser interpretation differential (CWE-436): a single crafted archive yields a different set of members under node-tar than under the reference tar tools. An attacker can use this to hide a member from one parser while it is visible to another, which defeats security tooling whose scanner and extractor disagree on archive contents (e.g. a malware/secret scanner that lists entries with one library while a downstream step extracts with another) This vulnerability is fixed in 7.5.16.

The advisory is available at github.com. This vulnerability is traded as CVE-2026-53655 since 06/09/2026. The exploitability is told to be easy. Local access is required to approach this attack. The exploitation doesn't require any form of authentication. The technical details are unknown and an exploit is not available.

Upgrading to version 7.5.16 eliminates this vulnerability.

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Productinfo

Vendor

• isaacs

Name

• node-tar

Version

• 7.5.0
• 7.5.1
• 7.5.2
• 7.5.3
• 7.5.4
• 7.5.5
• 7.5.6
• 7.5.7
• 7.5.8
• 7.5.9
• 7.5.10
• 7.5.11
• 7.5.12
• 7.5.13
• 7.5.14
• 7.5.15

Website

• Product: https://github.com/isaacs/node-tar/

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