CVE-2026-11940

A flaw was found in the tarfile.extractall() function within Python. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability by providing a specially crafted archive. This archive could bypass security filters by using a hardlink that references a symlink, allowing the symlink to be recreated outside the intended destination directory. This could lead to out-of-destination file reads or writes, potentially resulting in information disclosure or arbitrary file modification.

Red Hat products that appear in dependency searches under names containing "tarfile" but that are not the CPython standard-library tarfile module are not affected by this flaw. Matches such as the Go packages under github.com/containers/image / go.podman.io/image (.../docker/tarfile and .../docker/internal/tarfile) and the Apache Camel artifacts (camel-tarfile, camel-quarkus-tarfile) are unrelated implementations in other languages and do not include the vulnerable CPython tarfile.extractall() filter logic. The separately packaged PyPI component backports-tarfile is also out of scope for this CVE as assigned: it is not the CPython stdlib module named in the advisory and this CVE tracks the interpreter-provided tarfile shipped in Red Hat python3* packages.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base, or stability.