CVE-2023-42503

Improper Input Validation, Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in Apache Commons Compress in TAR parsing.This issue affects Apache Commons Compress: from 1.22 before 1.24.0.

Users are recommended to upgrade to version 1.24.0, which fixes the issue.

A third party can create a malformed TAR file by manipulating file modification times headers, which when parsed with Apache Commons Compress, will cause a denial of service issue via CPU consumption.

In version 1.22 of Apache Commons Compress, support was added for file modification times with higher precision (issue # COMPRESS-612 [1]). The format for the PAX extended headers carrying this data consists of two numbers separated by a period [2], indicating seconds and subsecond precision (for example “1647221103.5998539�). The impacted fields are “atime�, “ctime�, “mtime� and “LIBARCHIVE.creationtime�. No input validation is performed prior to the parsing of header values.

Parsing of these numbers uses the BigDecimal [3] class from the JDK which has a publicly known algorithmic complexity issue when doing operations on large numbers, causing denial of service (see issue # JDK-6560193 [4]). A third party can manipulate file time headers in a TAR file by placing a number with a very long fraction (300,000 digits) or a number with exponent notation (such as “9e9999999�) within a file modification time header, and the parsing of files with these headers will take hours instead of seconds, leading to a denial of service via exhaustion of CPU resources. This issue is similar to CVE-2012-2098 [5].

[1]: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COMPRESS-612
[2]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/pax.html#tag_20_92_13_05
[3]: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/math/BigDecimal.html
[4]: https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-6560193
[5]: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2012-2098

Only applications using CompressorStreamFactory class (with auto-detection of file types), TarArchiveInputStream and TarFile classes to parse TAR files are impacted. Since this code was introduced in v1.22, only that version and later versions are impacted.

Source: CVE-2023-42503