CVE-2026-79655

A flaw was found in sos clean, a utility within the sos package. This vulnerability allows a local attacker to perform arbitrary file creation or overwrite. By crafting a malicious tar archive, an attacker can exploit a path traversal issue during tar extraction, where symlink and hardlink targets are not properly validated. This enables the attacker to write files to arbitrary locations on the system with the privileges of the sos clean process, which often runs as root.

This vulnerability is rated as Important rather than Moderate because successful exploitation permits arbitrary file creation or modification with elevated privileges, typically root, which can lead to complete host compromise. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux and derived distributions, the sos package operates as an interactive administrative diagnostic utility rather than a persistent, network-exposed background service. Consequently, the risk is scoped to situations where an administrative user manually invokes the report obfuscation tooling against an untrusted or maliciously prepared archive.

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.

To mitigate this issue, avoid using the sos clean utility to extract tar archives from untrusted or unknown sources. This vulnerability requires user interaction to process a specially crafted archive.