The vulnerability involves the tar extraction routines in moby/go-archive. The extractor does not confine filesystem operations to the destination directory. It uses lexical string checks to decide where each archive entry lands, then performs filesystem operations on a path that is resolved by the OS, allowing links in the archive to be followed outside the destination directory. An attacker who controls the archive contents can create or overwrite files at arbitrary paths writable by the extracting process. This flaw corresponds to the Common Weakness Enumeration ID 59 – path traversal.

Affected products include the Docker CLI, Docker Compose, Docker Desktop, Docker Engine, Docker Sandboxes, and the moby/go-archive library underlying all these components. At the time of the advisory, versions 29.7.0 of the CLI, 5.4.0 of Compose, 48.60 of Docker Desktop, 29.7.0 of Docker Engine, 0.38.0 of Docker Sandboxes, and 0.3.0 of go-archive were known to contain the vulnerable code. These releases are referenced in the official Docker release notes and GitHub tags linked in the advisory.

The CVSS score of 7.1 indicates a medium‑to‑high severity with potential for privileged data modification. The EPSS score is not available, and the vulnerability is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog, suggesting no documented exploitation at this time. Nonetheless, the flaw can be exploited by supplying a crafted tar archive to any Docker component that performs extraction. Because the extractor follows symbolic links, an attacker with access to such a process can write or replace files in arbitrary directories writable by the service, potentially enabling privilege escalation or service disruption. The likely attack vector is local or remote exploits that can deliver a malicious archive to the target environment.