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

Overview

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.

Affected

• containers/storage < 1.55.1
• container-tools:rhel8 (all versions)
• podman (all versions)
• podman (all versions)
• buildah (all versions)
• buildah (all versions)
• cri-o (all versions)
• cri-o (all versions)
• cri-o (all versions)
• openshift4/ose-docker-builder (all versions)
• cri-o (all versions)
• openshift4/ose-docker-builder (all versions)
• cri-o (all versions)
• podman (all versions)
• openshift4/ose-docker-builder-rhel9 (all versions)
• cri-o (all versions)
• podman (all versions)
• openshift4/ose-docker-builder-rhel9 (all versions)
• buildah (all versions)
• conmon (all versions)
• conmon-rs (all versions)
• containers-common (all versions)
• container-selinux (all versions)
• cri-o (all versions)
• cri-tools (all versions)
• crudini (all versions)
• crun (all versions)
• golang-github-prometheus-promu (all versions)
• haproxy (all versions)
• ignition (all versions)
• kernel (all versions)
• libreswan (all versions)
• openshift (all versions)
• openshift4-aws-iso (all versions)
• openshift-ansible (all versions)
• openshift-clients (all versions)
• ose-aws-ecr-image-credential-provider (all versions)
• ose-azure-acr-image-credential-provider (all versions)
• ose-gcp-gcr-image-credential-provider (all versions)
• ovn24.09 (all versions)
• podman (all versions)
• pyOpenSSL (all versions)
• pysnmp (all versions)
• pysnmp-lextudio (all versions)
• python-alembic (all versions)
• python-amqp (all versions)
• python-automaton (all versions)
• python-autopage (all versions)
• python-bcrypt (all versions)
• python-beautifulsoup4 (all versions)

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.

Workarounds

Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability.