CVE-2026-23950 (GCVE-0-2026-23950)

Vulnerability from cvelistv5 – Published: 2026-01-20 00:40 – Updated: 2026-01-21 20:15
VLAI?
Title
node-tar has Race Condition in Path Reservations via Unicode Ligature Collisions on macOS APFS
Summary
node-tar,a Tar for Node.js, has a race condition vulnerability in versions up to and including 7.5.3. This is due to an incomplete handling of Unicode path collisions in the `path-reservations` system. On case-insensitive or normalization-insensitive filesystems (such as macOS APFS, In which it has been tested), the library fails to lock colliding paths (e.g., `ß` and `ss`), allowing them to be processed in parallel. This bypasses the library's internal concurrency safeguards and permits Symlink Poisoning attacks via race conditions. The library uses a `PathReservations` system to ensure that metadata checks and file operations for the same path are serialized. This prevents race conditions where one entry might clobber another concurrently. This is a Race Condition which enables Arbitrary File Overwrite. This vulnerability affects users and systems using node-tar on macOS (APFS/HFS+). Because of using `NFD` Unicode normalization (in which `ß` and `ss` are different), conflicting paths do not have their order properly preserved under filesystems that ignore Unicode normalization (e.g., APFS (in which `ß` causes an inode collision with `ss`)). This enables an attacker to circumvent internal parallelization locks (`PathReservations`) using conflicting filenames within a malicious tar archive. The patch in version 7.5.4 updates `path-reservations.js` to use a normalization form that matches the target filesystem's behavior (e.g., `NFKD`), followed by first `toLocaleLowerCase('en')` and then `toLocaleUpperCase('en')`. As a workaround, users who cannot upgrade promptly, and who are programmatically using `node-tar` to extract arbitrary tarball data should filter out all `SymbolicLink` entries (as npm does) to defend against arbitrary file writes via this file system entry name collision issue.
Severity ?
8.8 (High)
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:H/A:L
CWE
  • CWE-176 - Improper Handling of Unicode Encoding
  • CWE-352 - Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
  • CWE-367 - Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition
Assigner
References
Impacted products
Vendor Product Version
isaacs node-tar Affected: < 7.5.4
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