CVE-2016-7166

CVE-2016-7166 describes a denial-of-service vulnerability in libarchive versions prior to 3.2.0, also impacting Oracle and Red Hat products. Attackers can exploit this by crafting a malicious gzip file that triggers excessive recursive decompressions, leading to high memory consumption and application crashes. While rated Medium severity (CVSS 5.5) due to its local attack vector and user interaction requirement, the potential impact is a complete loss of availability. There is no evidence of active exploitation, publicly available exploit code, or significant community discussion surrounding this vulnerability.