CVE-2025-59825: astral-sh tokio-tar Path Traversal

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2025-59825 is a medium (CVSS 6.1) Path Traversal vulnerability in astral-sh tokio-tar. EPSS estimates a 0.22% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 11.3% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 23-09-2025
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 24-09-2025
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

astral-tokio-tar is a tar archive reading/writing library for async Rust. In versions 0.5.3 and earlier of astral-tokio-tar, tar archives may extract outside of their intended destination directory when using the Entry::unpack_in_raw API. Additionally, the Entry::allow_external_symlinks control (which defaults to true) could be bypassed via a pair of symlinks that individually point within the destination but combine to point outside of it. These behaviors could be used individually or combined to bypass the intended security control of limiting extraction to the given directory. This in turn would allow an attacker with a malicious tar archive to perform an arbitrary file write and potentially pivot into code execution. This issue has been patched in version 0.5.4. There is no workaround other than upgrading.

• CWE-22Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory ('Path Traversal')The product uses external input to construct a pathname that is intended to identify a file or directory that is located underneath a restricted parent directory, but the product does not properly neutralize special elements within the pathname that can cause the pathname to resolve to a location that is outside of the restricted directory.
• CWE-61UNIX Symbolic Link (Symlink) FollowingThe product, when opening a file or directory, does not sufficiently account for when the file is a symbolic link that resolves to a target outside of the intended control sphere. This could allow an attacker to cause the product to operate on unauthorized files.