CVE-2026-33055 MEDIUM

CVE-2026-33055: tar-rs incorrectly ignores PAX size headers if header size is nonzero

Vendor Alexcrichton
Product tar-rs
Weakness CWE-843
Published March 20, 2026
Last update March 20, 2026

CVSS base score

5.1/10
Attack vector Network
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required None
User interaction
Confidentiality
Integrity

CVSS vector

CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:L/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

What the vulnerability does

01Description

tar-rs is a tar archive reading/writing library for Rust. Versions 0.4.44 and below have conditional logic that skips the PAX size header in cases where the base header size is nonzero. As part of CVE-2025-62518, the astral-tokio-tar project was changed to correctly honor PAX size headers in the case where it was different from the base header. This is almost the inverse of the astral-tokio-tar issue. Any discrepancy in how tar parsers honor file size can be used to create archives that appear differently when unpacked by different archivers. In this case, the tar-rs (Rust tar) crate is an outlier in checking for the header size - other tar parsers (including e.g. Go archive/tar) unconditionally use the PAX size override. This can affect anything that uses the tar crate to parse archives and expects to have a consistent view with other parsers. This issue has been fixed in version 0.4.45.

Key dates

02Disclosure timeline

March 20, 2026 CVE published
March 20, 2026 Record updated