Inspektor Gadget: Unprivileged container can crash USDT note parser via crafted ELF

Summary

Inspektor Gadget is a set of tools and framework for data collection and system inspection on Kubernetes clusters and Linux hosts using eBPF. From 0.28.0 until 0.53.1, the USDT note parser in pkg/uprobetracer/usdt.go can allow an unprivileged container to crash or exhaust the memory of the privileged Inspektor Gadget process when a custom gadget containing a SEC("usdt/...") eBPF section attaches to a crafted ELF binary. The getUsdtInfo() function reads the .note.stapsdt section without validating that DescSize is large enough for three address fields, allowing an out-of-bounds slice operation to panic, and it uses untrusted NameSize and DescSize values for allocations that can consume gigabytes of memory. The parser also invokes debug/elf without panic recovery, allowing other malformed ELF structures to terminate the process. No gadget shipped by Inspektor Gadget uses USDT probes, so only deployments using custom USDT gadgets are affected, and the demonstrated impact is denial of service rather than code execution or privilege escalation. This issue is fixed in version 0.53.1.

Timeline

1. Sep 15, 2026, 5:00 PM UTCCVE published
2. Sep 17, 2026, 4:19 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

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

3. Sep 17, 2026, 4:19 PM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• inspektor-gadget inspektor-gadget

  From 0.28.0 · fixed in 0.53.1

• github.com/inspektor-gadget/inspektor-gadgetGo

  From 0.28.0 · fixed in 0.53.1

References 5