QID 670812

GNU cpio copies files into or out of a cpio or tar archive. Archives are files which contain a collection of other files plus information about them, such as their file name, owner, timestamps, and access permissions. The archive can be another file on the disk, a magnetic tape, or a pipe. GNU cpio supports the following archive formats: binary, old ASCII, new ASCII, crc, HPUX binary, HPUX old ASCII, old tar and POSIX.1 tar. By default, cpio creates binary format archives, so that they are compatible with older cpio programs. When it is extracting files from archives, cpio automatically recognizes which kind of archive it is reading and can read archives created on machines with a different byte-order. Install cpio if you need a program to manage file archives. Security Fix(es): 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.(CVE-2021-38185)
Note: The preceding description block is extracted directly from the security advisory. Using automation, we have attempted to clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

An arbitrary attacker may exploit this vulnerability to compromise the system.