CVE-2026-239508.8HighCWE-176

CVE-2026-23950: node-tar has Race Condition in Path Reservations via Unicode Ligature Collisions on macOS APFS

isaacs · node-tar

Vendor fix available · Affected: isaacs node-tar · Exploitation: unlikely (under 1%)

Not in CyberSIXT coverage yet: no article names this CVE. This page shows the public record.

0.3%probability of exploitation in the next 30 days

18th percentile

050100

Higher than 18% of scored CVEs

8.8HighCVSS 3.1

LowMediumHighCrit.

DescriptionCVE.org

node-tar,a Tar for Node.js, has a race condition vulnerability in versions up to and including 7.5.3. This is due to an incomplete handling of Unicode path collisions in the `path-reservations` system. On case-insensitive or normalization-insensitive filesystems (such as macOS APFS, In which it has been tested), the library fails to lock colliding paths (e.g., `ß` and `ss`), allowing them to be processed in parallel. This bypasses the library's internal concurrency safeguards and permits Symlink Poisoning attacks via race conditions. The library uses a `PathReservations` system to ensure that metadata checks and file operations for the same path are serialized. This prevents race conditions where one entry might clobber another concurrently. This is a Race Condition which enables Arbitrary File Overwrite. This vulnerability affects users and systems using node-tar on macOS (APFS/HFS+). Because of using `NFD` Unicode normalization (in which `ß` and `ss` are different), conflicting paths do not have their order properly preserved under filesystems that ignore Unicode normalization (e.g., APFS (in which `ß` causes an inode collision with `ss`)). This enables an attacker to circumvent internal parallelization locks (`PathReservations`) using conflicting filenames within a malicious tar archive. The patch in version 7.5.4 updates `path-reservations.js` to use a normalization form that matches the target filesystem's behavior (e.g., `NFKD`), followed by first `toLocaleLowerCase('en')` and then `toLocaleUpperCase('en')`. As a workaround, users who cannot upgrade promptly, and who are programmatically using `node-tar` to extract arbitrary tarball data should filter out all `SymbolicLink` entries (as npm does) to defend against arbitrary file writes via this file system entry name collision issue.

Affected products1

From the CVE record. A product or version that is not listed is unknown, not unaffected.

isaacs · node-tar< 7.5.4

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Exploitation: Unlikely (under 1%). EPSS under 1%, or no score yet.
CISA KEV: Not listed
Public check: No public nuclei template
Weakness: Improper Handling of Unicode Encoding · Injection and Smuggling
Vendor: isaacs
Published: January 2026
Band: Unlikely (under 1%), January 2026

CoverageNo articles yet

No CyberSIXT article names CVE-2026-23950 yet, so there is no coverage timeline, action brief or change log for it. Everything on this page comes from the public CVE record, CISA KEV, EPSS and the nuclei template index. Search the archive or see the CVEs in the news.