Heap Overflow in libarchive PAX Header Parsing
CVE-2026-15028 Published on July 10, 2026

Libarchive: heap overflow oob read while parsing a tar archive contains a pax extended header
A flaw was found in libarchive. This vulnerability allows a remote attacker to trigger a heap overflow by providing a specially crafted tar archive. The issue occurs during the parsing of a PAX extended header containing a malformed SUN.holesdata sparse-file attribute. Successful exploitation could lead to a denial of service, making the system unavailable, or potentially allow for arbitrary code execution, giving the attacker control over the affected system.

Vendor Advisory NVD

Vulnerability Analysis

CVE-2026-15028 is exploitable with local system access, requires user interaction and a small amount of user privileges. This vulnerability is considered to have a low attack complexity. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to have a small impact on confidentiality, a small impact on integrity, and a small impact on availability.

Attack Vector:
LOCAL
Attack Complexity:
LOW
Privileges Required:
LOW
User Interaction:
REQUIRED
Scope:
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality Impact:
LOW
Integrity Impact:
NONE
Availability Impact:
LOW

Timeline

Reported to Red Hat.

Made public.

Weakness Types

Buffer Access with Incorrect Length Value

The software uses a sequential operation to read or write a buffer, but it uses an incorrect length value that causes it to access memory that is outside of the bounds of the buffer. When the length value exceeds the size of the destination, a buffer overflow could occur.

Heap-based Buffer Overflow

A heap overflow condition is a buffer overflow, where the buffer that can be overwritten is allocated in the heap portion of memory, generally meaning that the buffer was allocated using a routine such as malloc().


Products Associated with CVE-2026-15028

You can be notified by email with stack.watch whenever vulnerabilities like CVE-2026-15028 are published in these products:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
 
Red Hat Hummingbird
 
Red Hat Openshift
 
Canonical Ubuntu Linux
 

Affected Versions

Red Hat Hardened Images: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9: Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4:

Exploit Probability

EPSS
0.20%
Percentile
10.50%

EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) scores estimate the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days. The percentile shows you how this score compares to all other vulnerabilities.