The flaw resides in ansible‑core's handling of collection archives. During an ansible-galaxy collection install, the extractor normalises paths with lexical normalisation rather than resolving symbolic links. It also omits containment checks for symlinked directories, permitting a crafted tarball to create a chain of symlinks that place a later file member outside the intended directory. This leads to an attacker, who can get a user to install a malicious collection, writing arbitrary files with the privileges of the ansible‑galaxy process and therefore executing code on the control node. The weakness corresponds to path traversal (CWE‑59).

Affected systems include a broad range of Red Hat products that ship ansible‑core, such as the Migration Toolkit for Applications and Virtualization, OpenShift Service Mesh, Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, the Ansible Automation Platform, Ansible Core, OpenShift Container Platform, OpenStack Platform 17.1 and 18.0, Satellite, Update Infrastructure, and various Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases. Version information is not provided, so any installation using ansible‑core that has not applied the recent fix may be vulnerable.

The CVSS score of 8.8 marks this vulnerability as high severity, and although the EPSS score is currently unavailable, the lack of a KEV listing does not diminish the risk. The vulnerability requires an attacker who can coerce the control node to run ansible‑galaxy with a malicious collection, which is feasible through compromised or untrusted collection sources or social‑engineering of an administrator. Once triggered, the attacker can overwrite critical files and execute arbitrary code with whatever permissions the control node runs under.