CVE intelligence

CVE-2026-90954

Vulnerability intelligence

Published Oct 14, 2026Sources checked Oct 21, 2026

7.8HIGHCVSS out of 10

What this means

Review the available evidence

CVE-2026-90954 and is rated High severity with a CVSS score of 7.8. It is not in the current CISA KEV record we collected. That does not prove exploitation has not occurred.

What to do next

Remediation and response

Microsoft Security Response Center guidance

Vendor revision: Oct 21, 2026

Release Notes

CISA KEVNot listedBased on the latest collected catalog

EPSS0.2%Estimated 30-day exploitation probability

Ransomware useNot markedCISA KEV ransomware field

Threat actors0Source-linked actor relationships

Overview

What is CVE-2026-90954?

A flaw was found in BusyBox's dpkg-deb archive extraction. The ar archive handler flushes deferred symlinks after each archive member, unlike the tar, cpio, and unzip handlers which flush once after the last member.

A specially crafted .deb archive with two data.tar members can exploit this ordering: the first member declares a symlink pointing to an absolute path (e.g., '/'), which is deferred as unsafe but flushed after the first member. The second member declares a regular file whose path traverses the now-live symlink, resulting in a file being written outside the intended extraction directory.

This could allow an attacker to write arbitrary files to arbitrary locations when a user extracts a crafted .deb package.

Source: NVD