CVE-2021-38185: GNU Cpio

High severity, CVSS 7.8. EPSS: 4.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

GNU cpio through 2.13 allows attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted pattern file, because of a dstring.c ds_fgetstr integer overflow that triggers an out-of-bounds heap write. NOTE: it is unclear whether there are common cases where the pattern file, associated with the -E option, is untrusted data.

Affected products

• GNU Cpio: up to and including 2.13

Published 2021-08-08. Last modified 2026-06-17.