A path traversal vulnerability was found in the CPIO utility. This issue could allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to trick a user into opening a specially crafted archive. During the extraction process, the archiver could follow symlinks outside of the intended directory, which could be utilized to run arbitrary commands on the target system.

Debian's cpio contains a path traversal vulnerability. This issue was introduced by reverting CVE-2015-1197 patches which had caused a regression in --no-absolute-filenames. Upstream has since provided a proper fix to --no-absolute-filenames.