CVE-2025-5917 is a vulnerability identified in the libarchive library, specifically affecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. The flaw is an off-by-one miscalculation in handling filename prefixes and suffixes, which results in a 1-byte out-of-bounds write overflow. This overflow can corrupt adjacent memory, potentially causing unpredictable program behavior or crashes. While the overflow is limited to a single byte, such memory corruption can sometimes be exploited as part of a more complex attack chain, although no known exploits currently exist in the wild. The CVSS score of 2.8 reflects a low severity, primarily because exploitation requires local access with low privileges, user interaction, and the impact is limited to availability (causing crashes) without compromising confidentiality or integrity. The vulnerability does not allow remote exploitation and does not escalate privileges by itself. The affected product is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, a widely used enterprise operating system in server environments. The vulnerability was published on June 9, 2025, and no patch links are currently provided, indicating that organizations should monitor vendor advisories for updates. The technical root cause is a boundary condition error in libarchive’s filename processing logic, which is a common library for handling archive files (e.g., tar, zip).

For European organizations, the primary impact of CVE-2025-5917 is potential denial of service due to application or system crashes when processing specially crafted archive files. This can disrupt business operations, particularly in environments where automated processing of archive files is common. Since the vulnerability requires local access and user interaction, the risk of widespread exploitation is low, but insider threats or compromised user accounts could leverage this flaw to cause instability. The lack of confidentiality or integrity impact reduces the risk of data breaches directly from this vulnerability. However, in critical infrastructure or high-availability environments, even minor disruptions can have significant operational consequences. Organizations relying heavily on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 for server workloads, especially those processing large volumes of archive files, should consider this vulnerability a potential availability risk. The absence of known exploits reduces immediate threat but does not eliminate future risk as attackers may develop exploitation techniques over time.

1. Monitor Red Hat security advisories closely for the release of patches addressing CVE-2025-5917 and apply them promptly once available. 2. Restrict local user privileges to the minimum necessary to reduce the risk of exploitation by low-privileged users. 3. Implement application whitelisting and restrict execution of untrusted archive files, especially from unknown or untrusted sources. 4. Employ runtime application self-protection or memory protection mechanisms (such as Address Space Layout Randomization and stack canaries) to mitigate the impact of memory corruption. 5. Monitor system and application logs for crashes or abnormal behavior related to libarchive usage to detect potential exploitation attempts. 6. Educate users about the risks of opening untrusted archive files and enforce policies to limit user interaction with potentially malicious content. 7. Consider isolating services that process archive files in sandboxed or containerized environments to limit the blast radius of any exploitation.