Threats affecting pkg:github/cri-o/cri-o

CVE-2026-76061 is a medium severity vulnerability in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 related to improper link resolution before file access in CRI-O's bind_mount_prefix handling. A malicious container or local attacker can exploit this by using a Container Runtime Interface (CRI) hostPath with an intermediate absolute symlink, potentially causing the bind mount source to resolve outside the intended directory. This may lead to unauthorized file access or privilege escalation on the host system.

A vulnerability in CRI-O checkpoint restore allows a user who can create a pod from a malicious checkpointed container to bypass the destination Kubernetes security context. The restored process may retain credentials, Linux capabilities, no_new_privs, and seccomp state from the checkpoint instead of enforcing the destination configuration. This can allow execution with elevated privileges across the container security boundary. Affected upstream supported versions are CRI-O 1.34 and later. Downstream Red Hat products are affected from OCP 4.17 onward. Fixes have been applied to supported branches but are not yet released. Exploitation requires permission to create a pod from a malicious checkpoint image and checkpoint restore functionality to be available.

A flaw was found in CRI-O's container-creation environment-variable handling (`mergeEnvs` in `server/utils.go`, consumed by `setupContainerEnvironmentAndWorkdir` in `server/container_create.go`). When a `CreateContainer` request supplies a `nil` CRI `Envs` field, CRI-O falls back to using the target OCI image's `config.Env` entries unfiltered, in contrast to the normal merge path, which validates each entry for a `key=value` form before use. An OCI image whose `config.Env` contains an entry with no `=` character (e.g. a bare `NOEQUALS` string) causes CRI-O to split that entry into a single-element slice and then index its second element, which is out of range. This triggers an unrecovered Go runtime panic in the `crio` daemon process, crashing it and terminating the container-runtime service for all workloads on the node until it is restarted.

A vulnerability was found in CRI-O. A path traversal issue in the log management functions (UnMountPodLogs and LinkContainerLogs) may allow an attacker with permissions to create and delete Pods to unmount arbitrary host paths, leading to node-level denial of service by unmounting critical system directories.

A flaw was found in cri-o. A malicious container can create a symbolic link to arbitrary files on the host via directory traversal (“../“). This flaw allows the container to read and write to arbitrary files on the host system.

A flaw was found in cri-o, where an arbitrary systemd property can be injected via a Pod annotation. Any user who can create a pod with an arbitrary annotation may perform an arbitrary action on the host system.