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 Type

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.