VulnerabilityPublished 4 Feb 2026

CVE-2026-25122: chainguard-dev apko · Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Affects chainguard-dev apkoSource CVE Database V5

Not known to be exploited · CVSS 5.5 Medium : upgrade to 1.1.0 when convenient.

Data as of 26 Oct 2026, 17:16 UTC

CVSS 3.1 base score

5.5Medium

How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.

EPSS: 0.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 2% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.
Patch: Available – fixed in 1.1.0

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Attack Vector: Local
Attack Complexity: Low
Privileges Required: None
User Interaction: Required
Scope: Unchanged
Confidentiality: None
Integrity: None
Availability: High

Bold values are the worst case: easiest to exploit or largest impact.

Attack Vector: Local: The vulnerable component is not bound to the network stack and the attacker’s path is via read/write/execute capabilities. Either: the attacker exploits the vulnerability by accessing the target system locally (e.g., keyboard, console), or remotely (e.g., SSH); or the attacker relies on User Interaction by another person to perform actions required to exploit the vulnerability (e.g., tricking a legitimate user into opening a malicious document).
Attack Complexity: Low: Specialized access conditions or extenuating circumstances do not exist. An attacker can expect repeatable success against the vulnerable component.
Privileges Required: None: The attacker is unauthorized prior to attack, and therefore does not require any access to settings or files to carry out an attack.
User Interaction: Required: Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires a user to take some action before the vulnerability can be exploited.
Scope: Unchanged: An exploited vulnerability can only affect resources managed by the same security authority. In this case, the vulnerable component and the impacted component are either the same, or both are managed by the same security authority.
Confidentiality: None: There is no loss of confidentiality within the impacted component.
Integrity: None: There is no loss of integrity within the impacted component.
Availability: High: There is total loss of availability, resulting in the attacker being able to fully deny access to resources in the impacted component; this loss is either sustained (while the attacker continues to deliver the attack) or persistent (the condition persists even after the attack has completed). Alternatively, the attacker has the ability to deny some availability, but the loss of availability presents a direct, serious consequence to the impacted component (e.g., the attacker cannot disrupt existing connections, but can prevent new connections; the attacker can repeatedly exploit a vulnerability that, in each instance of a successful attack, leaks a only small amount of memory, but after repeated exploitation causes a service to become completely unavailable).

Definitions: FIRST CVSS v3.1 specification.

Exploitation evidence

Disclosed: evidence found.
CVE published 4 Feb 2026
Detectable: no evidence on record.
No public nuclei template indexed
Weaponised: no evidence on record.
No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB
Exploited in the wildExploited: no evidence on record.
Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation
Observed by OffSeq MirageSeen by Mirage: no evidence on record.
No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 26 Oct 2026.

Disclosed: The CVE record is public on cve.org. Its publication is t = 0.
Detectable: A public nuclei template can find exposed instances, for defenders and attackers alike.
Weaponised: Public exploit code exists in Metasploit or Exploit-DB, or CISA SSVC or the CVSS exploit maturity reports a public proof of concept.
Exploited in the wild: CISA KEV lists it, CISA SSVC rates exploitation active, or a source reports attacks.
Observed by OffSeq Mirage: OffSeq Mirage honeypot sensors recorded attack traffic for this CVE, or found exposed hosts without attack traffic.

Moments are spaced evenly, not to scale; a dashed line marks a gap of six months or more. Deltas count from t = 0. Sources that give only a date (CISA KEV, Exploit-DB, or a time of exactly 00:00Z) read “same day” rather than hours. Metasploit modules carry the flaw’s disclosure date, not their release date, and nuclei templates carry no date, so both appear above but not on the timeline.

What to do

Upgrade apko and chainguard-dev/apko to 1.1.0.

Affected software

Product	Affected	Fixed in
chainguard-devapko	Affected >=0.14.8 <1.1.0	Fixed in 1.1.0
GitHubchainguard-dev/apko`pkg:github/chainguard-dev/apko`Other threats	Affected >=0.14.8 <1.1.0	Fixed in 1.1.0

Check your own hosts for these packages with threat-finder (opens in a new tab), our free open-source scanner.

AI-suggested

To mitigate CVE-2026-25122, European organizations should upgrade all instances of apko to version 1.1.0 or later, where the vulnerability has been patched by introducing limits on gzip decompression to prevent resource exhaustion. Until upgrades can be applied, organizations should implement strict input validation and sanitization to ensure that only trusted APK archives are processed by apko. Restricting access to the apko tool and its input sources to authorized personnel and systems reduces the risk of malicious input. Monitoring CPU usage and process performance during container builds can help detect anomalous resource consumption indicative of exploitation attempts. Additionally, integrating resource limits at the operating system or container runtime level (e.g., cgroups or container resource quotas) can prevent a single process from exhausting system resources. Finally, reviewing and hardening CI/CD pipeline security to prevent injection of malicious artifacts is recommended.

Description

apko allows users to build and publish OCI container images built from apk packages. From version 0.14.8 to before 1.1.0, expandapk.Split drains the first gzip stream of an APK archive via io.Copy(io.Discard, gzi) without explicit bounds. With an attacker-controlled input stream, this can force large gzip inflation work and lead to resource exhaustion (availability impact). The Split function reads the first tar header, then drains the remainder of the gzip stream by reading from the gzip reader directly without any maximum uncompressed byte limit or inflate-ratio cap. A caller that parses attacker-controlled APK streams may be forced to spend excessive CPU time inflating gzip data, leading to timeouts or process slowdown. This issue has been patched in version 1.1.0.

Impact

For European organizations, the primary impact of CVE-2026-25122 is on the availability of container build pipelines that utilize vulnerable versions of apko. Organizations relying on apko to build OCI container images from apk packages may experience denial of service conditions if an attacker supplies crafted APK archives, causing excessive CPU consumption and process slowdowns or timeouts. This can delay or halt container image creation, impacting continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows and potentially delaying software releases or updates. While the vulnerability does not compromise confidentiality or integrity, the disruption to availability can affect operational efficiency and service delivery. Organizations with automated build environments exposed to untrusted inputs or third-party APK packages are at higher risk. The absence of known exploits reduces immediate risk, but the medium severity rating and ease of triggering via crafted input warrant prompt remediation to avoid service interruptions.

CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (opens in a new tab)
Class weaknessLikelihood of exploit: High
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
MITRE discourages mapping vulnerabilities to this broad entry; the root cause is usually a more specific weakness.
Architecture and Design
Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place.
Architecture and Design
Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either: recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, or; uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed.
Architecture and Design
Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
OWASP Cheat Sheets
File Upload (opens in a new tab)
OWASP ASVS 4.0.3
V12.1.1 (opens in a new tab)
Attack patterns
XML Ping of the Death (opens in a new tab)
Regular Expression Exponential Blowup (opens in a new tab)
Sustained Client Engagement (opens in a new tab)
From MITRE CWE, MITRE CAPEC and OWASP (Top 10, OpenCRE).

References

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Exploitation evidence

What to do

Affected software

Description

AI analysisMachine-generated, updated 4 Feb 2026, 19:30 UTC

WeaknessesCWE-400

Technical details

References

Community reviews

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