Jim Meyering discovered several buffer overflows in GNU tar, which may lead to the execution of arbitrary code through specially crafted tar archives.
The old stable distribution (woody) is not affected by this problem.
For the stable distribution (sarge) this problem has been fixed in version 1.14-2.1.
For the unstable distribution (sid) this problem has been fixed in version 1.15.1-3.
We recommend that you upgrade your tar package.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.