Star is a tar-like archiver. It saves multiple files into a single tape or disk archive, and can restore individual files from the archive. Star includes multi-volume support, automatic archive format detection and ACL support.
A path traversal flaw was discovered in the way star extracted archives. A malicious user could create a tar archive that would cause star to write to arbitrary files to which the user running star had write access. (CVE-2007-4134)
Red Hat would like to thank Robert Buchholz for reporting this issue.
As well, this update adds the command line argument "-.." to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 version of star. This allows star to extract files containing "/../" in their pathname.
Users of star should upgrade to this updated package, which contain backported patches to correct these issues.