CVE-2026-9538
Published: 26 May 2026
Summary
CVE-2026-9538 is a high-severity Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value (CWE-789) vulnerability in Archive\ \. Its CVSS base score is 7.5 (High).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Application or System Exploitation (T1499.004); ranked at the 35.1th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2026-31775
Vulnerability details
Archive::Tar versions before 3.10 for Perl allow memory exhaustion via attacker controlled entry size field in tar header. _read_tar() reads each entry's payload with $handle->read($$data, $block), where $block is derived from the entry's 12-byte size field in the tar header…
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with no upper bound on that value. A crafted header declaring a multi-gigabyte size causes Perl to allocate a scalar of that size.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Memory exhaustion via unbounded tar header size field directly enables application/system DoS through exploitation of input parsing.
CVEs Like This One
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
No mitigating controls mapped yet. The per-CVE control annotator has not reached this CVE.