Path traversal vulnerabilities in handling of Tar archives in Gradle

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. In affected versions when unpacking Tar archives, Gradle did not check that files could be written outside of the unpack location. This could lead to important files being overwritten anywhere the Gradle process has write permissions. For a build reading Tar entries from a Tar archive, this issue could allow Gradle to disclose information from sensitive files through an arbitrary file read. To exploit this behavior, an attacker needs to either control the source of an archive already used by the build or modify the build to interact with a malicious archive. It is unlikely that this would go unnoticed. A fix has been released in Gradle 7.6.2 and 8.2 to protect against this vulnerability. Starting from these versions, Gradle will refuse to handle Tar archives which contain path traversal elements in a Tar entry name. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

Impact

This is a path traversal vulnerability when Gradle deals with Tar archives, often referenced as TarSlip, a variant of ZipSlip.

• When unpacking Tar archives, Gradle did not check that files could be written outside of the unpack location. This could lead to important files being overwritten anywhere the Gradle process has write permissions.
• For a build reading Tar entries from a Tar archive, this issue could allow Gradle to disclose information from sensitive files t…