## Impact
In versions 0.5.6 and earlier of astral-tokio-tar, malformed PAX extensions were silently skipped when parsing tar archives. This silent skipping (rather than rejection) of invalid PAX extensions could be used as a building block for a parser differential, for example by having astral-tokio-tar silently skip a malformed GNU “long link” extension so that a subsequent parser would misinterpret the extension.
In practice, exploiting this behavior in astral-tokio-tar requires a secondary misbehaving tar parser, i.e. one that insufficiently validates malformed PAX extensions and interprets them rather than skipping or erroring on them. Consequently this advisory is considered low-severity within astral-tokio-tar itself, as it requires a separate vulnerability against any unrelated tar parser.
## Patches
Versions 0.6.0 and newer of astral-tokio-tar reject invalid PAX extensions, rather than silently skipping them.
## Workarounds
Users are advised to upgrade to version 0.6.0 or newer to address this advisory.
Most users should experience no breaking changes as a result of the patch above. Some users who attempt to extract poorly constructed tar files may experience errors; users should re-construct their tar files with a conforming tar parser.
## Attribution
- Sergei Zimmerman (@xokdvium)