Dmitry Levin discovered a vulnerability in path handling code used by the cpio archive utility. The weakness could enable a denial of service (crash) or potentially the execution of arbitrary code if a vulnerable version of cpio is used to extract or to list the contents of a maliciously crafted archive.
For the stable distribution (etch), these problems have been fixed in version 2.6-18.1+etch1.
For the unstable distribution (sid), these problems have been fixed in version 2.9-5.
We recommend that you upgrade your cpio packages.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.