CVE-2026-17113 Cri-o: cri-o: unvalidated image env var causes daemon crash
A malicious OCI image with malformed environment variables can crash the CRI-O daemon, causing a denial of service for all workloads on the node.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- An administrator
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2026-17113?
CVE-2026-17113 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4, published on 24 Aug 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
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.
Weakness: CWE-1287
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-17113?
How do I fix CVE-2026-17113?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-17113 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2026-17113 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-17113 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as AZL-97649.