High [CVE-2026-53486] @xhmikosr/decompress: Decompress: Arbitrary file read/write via crafted archive extraction
This high-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-53486 affecting Red Hat Hardened Images, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2, Red Hat Build of Keycloak.
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Summary
The decompress package for Node.js extracts archives. Prior to 10.2.1 and 11.1.3, archive extraction can create files and links outside the target directory.
When extracting an archive to a directory, a crafted archive can read or write files outside that directory because hardlink and symlink entries are created without checking where targets point, path containment used a string prefix comparison, and file modes failed to remove setuid, setgid, or sticky bits.
This issue is fixed in @xhmikosr/decompress versions 10.2.1 and 11.1.3. A remote attacker can exploit this vulnerability by crafting a malicious archive.
This can result in high confidentiality and integrity impacts. Red Hat Build of Keycloak, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (VolSync), Red Hat Hardened Images (dotnet8.0), and the Fedora/EPEL yarnpkg packages bundle the original, unmaintained npm decompress package (version 4.2.1 or earlier), which does not receive an upstream fix for this issue.
Red Hat rates this issue with a CVSS score of 8.1 (Important), reflecting that in these products archive extraction is performed on locally supplied or build-time archives rather than automatically on arbitrary network-supplied input, which Red Hat scores as requiring user interaction (UI:R) in contrast to the upstream CVSS score of 9.1. Weakness: CWE-22.
- < 10.2.1
- < 11.1.3
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 6 days ago·verify at source
- 10.2.1
- 11.1.3
- dotnet8-0-main-8.0.128-1.2.hum1
- RHSA-2026:40415
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 6 days ago·verify at source
Mitigation checklist
- There is no upstream fix for the original, unmaintained decompress npm package used by these components (last release 4.2.1). The maintained fork, @xhmikosr/decompress, resolves this issue in versions 10.2.1 and 11.1.3, but is not used by any affected Red Hat component. As a general mitigation, only extract archives from trusted sources with the affected tooling, run extraction as a non-root user to prevent the setuid/setgid/sticky-bit issue from creating a privileged file, and verify that any symlinks or hardlinks produced by extraction resolve inside the intended output directory.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 6 days ago·verify at source
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