The GNU tar program saves many files together in one archive and can restore individual files from that archive. A heap-based buffer overflow flaw was found in the way tar expanded archive files. If a user were tricked into expanding a specially-crafted archive, it could cause the tar executable to crash or execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running tar. Red Hat would like to thank Jakob Lell for responsibly reporting this issue. Users of tar are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which contains a backported patch to correct this issue.