Threats affecting pkg:golang/github.com/golang/go/src/archive/tar

CVE-2026-32288 is a medium severity vulnerability in the Go standard library's archive/tar package. The tar.Reader component can consume an unbounded amount of memory when processing malicious tar archives with many sparse regions encoded using the old GNU sparse map format. This can lead to denial of service due to excessive memory use. The vulnerability affects Go versions up to 1.26.0-0. No patch or official remediation is currently available, and no exploits have been reported in the wild.

tar.Reader does not set a maximum size on the number of sparse region data blocks in GNU tar pax 1.0 sparse files. A maliciously-crafted archive containing a large number of sparse regions can cause a Reader to read an unbounded amount of data from the archive into memory. When reading from a compressed source, a small compressed input can result in large allocations.