The GNU tar program saves many files together in one archive and can restore individual files (or all of the files) from that archive.
A path traversal flaw was discovered in the way GNU tar extracted archives. A malicious user could create a tar archive that could write to arbitrary files to which the user running GNU tar had write access. (CVE-2007-4131)
Red Hat would like to thank Dmitry V. Levin for reporting this issue.
Users of tar should upgrade to this updated package, which contains a replacement backported patch to correct this issue.