libarchive is a library for manipulating different streaming archive formats, including certain tar variants, several cpio formats, and both BSD and GNU ar variants.
CPNI, CERT-FI, Tim Kientzle, and Colin Percival reported a buffer overflow (CVE-2007-3641), an infinite loop (CVE-2007-3644), and a NULL pointer dereference (CVE-2007-3645) within the processing of archives having corrupted PaX extension headers.
An attacker can trick a user or automated system to process an archive with malformed PaX extension headers into execute arbitrary code, crash an application using the library, or cause a high CPU load.
There is no known workaround at this time.
All libarchive or bsdtar users should upgrade to the latest libarchive version:
# emerge --sync
# emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-arch/libarchive-2.2.4"