Copyright © 2012 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved. Important 2026-08-21T08:00:00 sos: sos: path traversal in sos clean tar extraction via unvalidated symlink/hardlink targets leads to arbitrary file write 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H CWE-59

A flaw was found in sos clean, a utility within the sos package. This vulnerability allows a local attacker to perform arbitrary file creation or overwrite. By crafting a malicious tar archive, an attacker can exploit a path traversal issue during tar extraction, where symlink and hardlink targets are not properly validated. This enables the attacker to write files to arbitrary locations on the system with the privileges of the sos clean process, which often runs as root.

A flaw was found in sos clean, a utility within the sos package. This vulnerability allows a local attacker to perform arbitrary file creation or overwrite. By crafting a malicious tar archive, an attacker can exploit a path traversal issue during tar extraction, where symlink and hardlink targets are not properly validated. This enables the attacker to write files to arbitrary locations on the system with the privileges of the sos clean process, which often runs as root.

This issue was discovered by Sandipan Roy (Red Hat). To mitigate this issue, avoid using the `sos clean` utility to extract tar archives from untrusted or unknown sources. This vulnerability requires user interaction to process a specially crafted archive. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Affected sos Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Out of support scope sos Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Affected sos Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Affected sos Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Affected sos https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-79655 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-79655 https://github.com/sosreport/sos/issues/4460 https://github.com/sosreport/sos/pull/4461