Vulnerability in Alexcrichton Tar-Rs

CVE-2026-33055

tar-rs is a tar archive reading/writing library for Rust. Versions 0.4.44 and below have conditional logic that skips the PAX size header in cases where the base header size is nonzero. As part of CVE-2025-62518, the astral-tokio-tar project was changed to correctly honor PAX size headers in the case where it was different from the base header. This is almost the inverse of the astral-tokio-tar issue. Any discrepancy in how tar parsers honor file size can be used to create archives that appear differently when unpacked by different archivers. In this case, the tar-rs (Rust tar) crate is an outlier in checking for the header size - other tar parsers (including e.g. Go archive/tar) unconditionally use the PAX size override. This can affect anything that uses the tar crate to parse archives and expects to have a consistent view with other parsers. This issue has been fixed in version 0.4.45.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 8.1 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.005 (38.9th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 39th percentile — 38.9% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-33055: held from 0.004 to 0.005.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.004 · newest: 0.005 · change: +0.001

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-33055?
CVE-2026-33055 is a high-severity vulnerability in Alexcrichton Tar-Rs, classified under Access of Resource Using Incompatible Type (Type Confusion). CVSS score: 8.1/10. Published 2026-03-20.
How severe is CVE-2026-33055?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 8.1 out of 10.