Apache Commons Compress 1.1 to 1.20 denial of service vulnerability

Summary

When reading a specially crafted TAR archive, Compress can be made to allocate large amounts of memory that finally leads to an out of memory error even for very small inputs. This could be used to mount a denial of service attack against services that use Compress' tar package.

Timeline

1. Jul 13, 2021, 7:15 AM UTCCVE published
2. Oct 8, 2026, 9:05 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: none · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial

3. Oct 8, 2026, 9:13 PM UTCRecord last updated
4. Oct 22, 2026EPSS reached 10%

   FIRST estimates at least a 10% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days

Affected versions

• Apache Software Foundation Apache Commons Compress

  From 1.1 · fixed in Apache Commons Compress*

• org.apache.commons:commons-compressMaven

  fixed in 1.21

References 22