CVE-2008-5157: Uoregon Tau

Medium severity, CVSS 6.9. EPSS: 0.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

tau 2.16.4 allows local users to overwrite arbitrary files via a symlink attack on a (1) /tmp/makefile.tau.*.##### or (2) /tmp/makefile.tau*.##### temporary file, related to the (a) tau_cxx, (b) tau_f90, and (c) tau_cc scripts.

Affected products

• Uoregon Tau: version 2.16.4 only

Published 2008-11-18. Last modified 2026-06-16.