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 heap-based buffer overflow flaw was found in the way tar expanded archive files. If a user were tricked into expanding a specially-crafted archive, it could cause the tar executable to crash or execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running tar. (CVE-2010-0624)
Red Hat would like to thank Jakob Lell for responsibly reporting this issue.
Users of tar are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which contains a backported patch to correct this issue.