CVE-2006-6097: GNU Tar

Medium severity, CVSS 4.0. EPSS: 11% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

GNU tar 1.16 and 1.15.1, and possibly other versions, allows user-assisted attackers to overwrite arbitrary files via a tar file that contains a GNUTYPE_NAMES record with a symbolic link, which is not properly handled by the extract_archive function in extract.c and extract_mangle function in mangle.c, a variant of CVE-2002-1216.

Affected products

• GNU Tar: version 1.15.1 only; version 1.16 only

Published 2006-11-24. Last modified 2026-06-16.