Welcome to our comprehensive guide on CVE-2020-28948, a significant security vulnerability that has been identified within Archive_Tar, an essential component for handling TAR files in PHP projects. This guide will provide you with all the necessary details to understand the severity of this vulnerability, how it affects your systems, and the steps you need to take to ensure your systems are secure.
What is Archive_Tar?
Archive_Tar is a widely-used PHP library designed for creating, modifying, and extracting .tar archives. This library is crucial for many applications and systems that handle archive operations within PHP environments, making it a fundamental tool for numerous web and software projects.
About the Vulnerability (CVE-2020-28948)
CVE-2020-28948 was officially published with a severity rating of HIGH and a CVSS score of 7.8, indicating its significant potential impact. The vulnerability stems from an unserialization attack in the Archive_Tar library. Unserialization attacks can allow attackers to execute arbitrary code by providing malformed data that leads to unintended code execution during the unserialization process.
Specifically, CVE-2020-28948 exploits the fact that while the 'phar:' protocol wrapper is blocked as a security measure within the Archive_Tar library, the uppercase variant 'PHAR:' is not similarly restricted. This oversight allows an attacker to bypass the security mechanisms and achieve remote code execution by crafting a malicious .tar archive that includes a PHAR stream wrapper.
Impact on Systems
This vulnerability poses a risk to any application that uses the Archive_Tar library to handle TAR files, especially if the application accepts TAR files from untrusted sources. The potential for remote code execution makes it a critical issue for web applications, content management systems, and other software that relies on this library for archive management.
How to Mitigate the Risk
To mitigate the risk associated with CVE-2020-28948, it is crucial to update the Archive_Tar library to version 1.4.11 or later, where the vulnerability has been addressed. Updating this library should be a priority in your security maintenance tasks. Additionally, consider implementing controls to validate and sanitize inputs that handle TAR files to reduce the risk of similar vulnerabilities exploit.
Further Recommendations
Beyond updating the Archive_Tar library, we recommend:
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