Podman: buildah: cri-o: symlink traversal vulnerability in the containers/storage library can cause denial of service (dos)

Summary

A vulnerability was found in Podman, Buildah, and CRI-O. A symlink traversal vulnerability in the containers/storage library can cause Podman, Buildah, and CRI-O to hang and result in a denial of service via OOM kill when running a malicious image using an automatically assigned user namespace (`--userns=auto` in Podman and Buildah). The containers/storage library will read /etc/passwd inside the container, but does not properly validate if that file is a symlink, which can be used to cause the library to read an arbitrary file on the host.

Timeline

1. Oct 15, 2024, 3:27 PM UTCCVE published
2. Oct 15, 2024, 3:45 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

3. Apr 24, 2026, 3:07 PM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• containers/storage

  fixed in 1.55.1

• container-tools:rhel8

  Version range not reported

• podman

  Version range not reported

• podman

  Version range not reported

• buildah

  Version range not reported

• buildah

  Version range not reported

• cri-o

  Version range not reported

• cri-o

  Version range not reported

• cri-o

  Version range not reported

• openshift4/ose-docker-builder

  Version range not reported

• cri-o

  Version range not reported

• openshift4/ose-docker-builder

  Version range not reported

• cri-o

  Version range not reported

• podman

  Version range not reported

• openshift4/ose-docker-builder-rhel9

  Version range not reported

• cri-o

  Version range not reported

• podman

  Version range not reported

• openshift4/ose-docker-builder-rhel9

  Version range not reported

• jenkins-agent-base-rhel9-container

  Version range not reported

• ocp-tools-4/jenkins-agent-base-rhel8

  Version range not reported

• ocp-tools-4/jenkins-rhel8

  Version range not reported

• buildah

  Version range not reported

• podman

  Version range not reported

• skopeo

  Version range not reported

• conmon

  Version range not reported

• skopeo

  Version range not reported

• buildah

  Version range not reported

• conmon

  Version range not reported

• skopeo

  Version range not reported

• quay/quay-builder-rhel8

  Version range not reported

References 21