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CVE-2026-23950: node-tar has Race Condition in Path Reservations via Unicode Ligature Collisions on macOS APFS

High · CVSS 8.8 (CVSS 3.1)EPSS 0.26%, 18th percentilePublished Updated Assigner: GitHub_M

Description

node-tar,a Tar for Node.js, has a race condition vulnerability in versions up to and including 7.5.3. This is due to an incomplete handling of Unicode path collisions in the `path-reservations` system. On case-insensitive or normalization-insensitive filesystems (such as macOS APFS, In which it has been tested), the library fails to lock colliding paths (e.g., `ß` and `ss`), allowing them to be processed in parallel. This bypasses the library's internal concurrency safeguards and permits Symlink Poisoning attacks via race conditions. The library uses a `PathReservations` system to ensure that metadata checks and file operations for the same path are serialized. This prevents race conditions where one entry might clobber another concurrently. This is a Race Condition which enables Arbitrary File Overwrite. This vulnerability affects users and systems using node-tar on macOS (APFS/HFS+). Because of using `NFD` Unicode normalization (in which `ß` and `ss` are different), conflicting paths do not have their order properly preserved under filesystems that ignore Unicode normalization (e.g., APFS (in which `ß` causes an inode collision with `ss`)). This enables an attacker to circumvent internal parallelization locks (`PathReservations`) using conflicting filenames within a malicious tar archive. The patch in version 7.5.4 updates `path-reservations.js` to use a normalization form that matches the target filesystem's behavior (e.g., `NFKD`), followed by first `toLocaleLowerCase('en')` and then `toLocaleUpperCase('en')`. As a workaround, users who cannot upgrade promptly, and who are programmatically using `node-tar` to extract arbitrary tarball data should filter out all `SymbolicLink` entries (as npm does) to defend against arbitrary file writes via this file system entry name collision issue.

Vector CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:H/A:L · CWE-176, CWE-352, CWE-367

Tracked companies

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Status incidents that name it

No tracked status incident names this CVE.

Affected vendors and products

isaacs: node-tarRed Hat: Confidential Compute AttestationRed Hat: Cryostat 4Red Hat: Logging Subsystem for Red Hat OpenShiftRed Hat: Migration Toolkit for ContainersRed Hat: Multicluster Engine for KubernetesRed Hat: Network Observability OperatorRed Hat: Node HealthCheck OperatorRed Hat: OpenShift LightspeedRed Hat: OpenShift PipelinesRed Hat: OpenShift ServerlessRed Hat: Red Hat 3scale API Management Platform 2Red Hat: Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2Red Hat: Red Hat AMQ Broker 7Red Hat: Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2Red Hat: Red Hat build of Apache Camel - HawtIO 4Red Hat: Red Hat Connectivity Link 1Red Hat: Red Hat Developer HubRed Hat: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10Red Hat: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6Red Hat: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7Red Hat: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8Red Hat: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9Red Hat: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI) 3Red Hat: Red Hat Fuse 7Red Hat: Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7Red Hat: Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 8Red Hat: Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform Expansion PackRed Hat: Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI)Red Hat: Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4Red Hat: Red Hat Openshift Data Foundation 4Red Hat: Red Hat OpenShift GitOpsRed Hat: Red Hat Process Automation 7Red Hat: Red Hat Quay 3Red Hat: Red Hat Satellite 6Red Hat: Red Hat Single Sign-On 7

References

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