CVE-2025-27612 Libcontainer is affected by capabilities elevation
Attackers using libcontainer's tenant builder can elevate container capabilities, potentially gaining unauthorized privileges within the container environment.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2025-27612?
CVE-2025-27612 is a medium-severity vulnerability in youki-dev youki, published on 21 Mar 2025. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
libcontainer is a library for container control. Prior to libcontainer 0.5.3, while creating a tenant container, the tenant builder accepts a list of capabilities to be added in the spec of tenant container. The logic here adds the given capabilities to all capabilities of main container if present in spec, otherwise simply set provided capabilities as capabilities of the tenant container. However, setting inherited caps in any case for tenant container can lead to elevation of capabilities, similar to CVE-2022-29162. This does not affect youki binary itself. This is only applicable if you are using libcontainer directly and using the tenant builder.
Weakness: CWE-276
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-27612?
2 open source packages ship an affected version, including libcontainer.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
libcontainer crates.io | All versions | 0.5.3 |
libcontainer crates.io | All versions | 0.5.3 |
How do I fix CVE-2025-27612?
Upgrade libcontainer to 0.5.3 or later.
Is CVE-2025-27612 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-27612 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as CLEANSTART-2026-ON51112, GHSA-5w4j-f78p-4wh9, MINI-3422-2gmx-66gj, MINI-5w5r-8r77-36v7, MINI-6r6r-fcjj-m682, MINI-9h95-vmmq-g7pg and 13 more.