apex-security-research <[email protected]> writes:

> Collin, one fact so you do not have to guess at it.
>
> That patch was written with model assistance.  It is not a clean-authored 
> diff and
> your reading of the copyright position is the right one, so writing your own 
> from
> the description is the shortest path to a fix.  Use my analysis and the 
> reproducer
> freely; the credit for the defect itself is Vahagn Vardanian's.
>
> No copyright assignment is on offer from me today, so please do not wait on 
> one.
>
> If it helps, I will test whatever you and the maintainers settle on against 
> the
> desynchronised-map case and report back in one paragraph.

Thanks for the clarification. Your patch is pretty short, though. If I
were to write code to acheive the same behavior, it likely would look
the same or very similar to it.

I do wonder if it is the correct fix though. E.g., I notice using a
archive that reproduces the issue, 'bsdtar' will list and extract the
same files.

Collin

>
> Apex Security Research
> [email protected]
>
>
>
>
>
> Sent with Proton Mail secure email.
>
> On Friday, November 6th, 2026 at 9:40 AM, Collin Funk 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi Pavel,
>> 
>> Pavel Cahyna  <[email protected]> writes:
>> 
>> > I saw your oss-security post and thank you a lot for the analysis.
>> >
>> > While the report contained a ton of slop, this part was unfortunately
>> > real (although written in a too grandiose way, i.e. claiming a RCE). I
>> > let AI generate a reproducer (while AI reports are often slop, it is
>> > usually pretty good at writing reproducers) and verified it works before
>> > assigning the CVE. See:
>> > /tmp/test_extract$ tar -tf ~/miscsrc/tar/exploit.tar
>> > .cache
>> > .gitignore
>> > /tmp/test_extract$ tar -tvf ~/miscsrc/tar/exploit.tar
>> > -rw-r--r-- 0/0            4096 1970-01-01 01:00 .cache
>> > -rw-r--r-- 0/0            1024 1970-01-01 01:00 .gitignore
>> > /tmp/test_extract$ tar -xvf ~/miscsrc/tar/exploit.tar
>> > .cache
>> > Makefile
>> > /tmp/test_extract$ ls -A
>> > .cache  Makefile
>> 
>> Thanks! By the way, I realize now my previous message may have sounded
>> rude/accusatory. I've always had good experiences with Red Hat's
>> security team, so I assumed you'd verified it and did not mean to imply
>> otherwise, but I wanted to confirm.
>> 
>> I've also noticed LLMs quickly claiming RCEs. In this case, I disagree
>> with that because it requires you to invoke 'make' on an unknown
>> Makefile. In a bug-free world, a malicious maintainer could easily just
>> write a malicious Makefile and distribute it, and that very obviously
>> wouldn't be considered an RCE. I assume that is similar to your
>> rationale as well.
>> 
>> Regarding your other comments on LLMs, I certainly agree. We signed GNU
>> coreutils for Anthropic's OSS scanner. I pretty much just look at the
>> reproducers and maybe the first paragraph of the summary, instead of
>> wasting my time reading the overly long essays accompanying them. That
>> has been a pretty effective strategy so far, at least.
>> 
>> I suspect Sergey and Paul will want to accept an LLM-generated patch for
>> copyright purposes. I'll see if I can write one based on the problem
>> description this weekend for them to review.
>> 
>> Thank you both for the report and analysis,
>> Collin
>> 

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