CVE-2024-45310 runc can be confused to create empty files/directories on the host

What is CVE-2024-45310?

CVE-2024-45310 is a low-severity vulnerability in opencontainers runc, published on 3 Sep 2024. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

runc is a CLI tool for spawning and running containers according to the OCI specification. runc 1.1.13 and earlier, as well as 1.2.0-rc2 and earlier, can be tricked into creating empty files or directories in arbitrary locations in the host filesystem by sharing a volume between two containers and exploiting a race with `os.MkdirAll`. While this could be used to create empty files, existing files would not be truncated. An attacker must have the ability to start containers using some kind of custom volume configuration. Containers using user namespaces are still affected, but the scope of places an attacker can create inodes can be significantly reduced. Sufficiently strict LSM policies (SELinux/Apparmor) can also in principle block this attack -- we suspect the industry standard SELinux policy may restrict this attack's scope but the exact scope of protection hasn't been analysed. This is exploitable using runc directly as well as through Docker and Kubernetes. The issue is fixed in runc v1.1.14 and v1.2.0-rc3.

Some workarounds are available. Using user namespaces restricts this attack fairly significantly such that the attacker can only create inodes in directories that the remapped root user/group has write access to. Unless the root user is remapped to an actual user on the host (such as with rootless containers that don't use `/etc/sub[ug]id`), this in practice means that an attacker would only be able to create inodes in world-writable directories. A strict enough SELinux or AppArmor policy could in principle also restrict the scope if a specific label is applied to the runc runtime, though neither the extent to which the standard existing policies block this attack nor what exact policies are needed to sufficiently restrict this attack have been thoroughly tested.

Weakness: CWE-61, CWE-363

Which versions are affected by CVE-2024-45310?

5 open source packages ship an affected version, including github.com/opencontainers/runc. It affects 1 product.

Products include Linuxfoundation Runc.

How do I fix CVE-2024-45310?

Upgrade github.com/opencontainers/runc to a fixed version for your release line: 1.1.14 or 1.2.0-rc.3.

Is CVE-2024-45310 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-45310 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in opencontainers runc

• CVE-2025-52565 container escape due to /dev/console mount and related races High 8.4
• CVE-2025-31133 runc container escape via "masked path" abuse due to mount race conditions High 7.3
• CVE-2025-52881 runc: LSM labels can be bypassed with malicious config using dummy procfs files High 7.3
• CVE-2023-28642 AppArmor bypass with symlinked /proc in runc Medium 6.1
• CVE-2023-25809 rootless: `/sys/fs/cgroup` is writable when cgroupns isn't unshared in runc Medium 5.0

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as AZL-48519, AZL-48525, AZL-48531, AZL-48543, AZL-48555, AZL-48567 and 30 more.