node-tar — Malware (CVE-2026-53655)
Date: 2026-06
Affected: isaacs/tar
Attack vector: malware
Category: vulnerability-disclosure
Severity: Medium
CVE: CVE-2026-53655
CWE: CWE-436
CVSS: 5.5 (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N)

node-tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js. Prior to 7.5.16, tar (node-tar) applies a PAX extended header's size= record (and other PAX overrides) to the next header entry of any type, including intermediary metadata headers such as a GNU long-name (L) or long-link (K) entry. Per POSIX pax, a PAX extended header (x) describes the next file entry, not the intermediary extension headers that may sit between the x header and the file it annotates. Because node-tar lets the PAX size override the byte length of an intervening L/K/x header, an attacker can desynchronize node-tar's stream cursor relative to every other mainstream tar implementation (GNU tar, libarchive/bsdtar, Python tarfile, and the now-fixed tar-rs / astral-tokio-tar). The result is a tar parser interpretation differential (CWE-436): a single crafted archive yields a different set of members under node-tar than under the reference tar tools. An attacker can use this to hide a member from one parser while it is visible to another, which defeats security tooling whose scanner and extractor disagree on archive contents (e.g. a malware/secret scanner that lists entries with one library while a downstream step extracts with another) This vulnerability is fixed in 7.5.16.


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):