# CVE-2026-31890: Inspektor Gadget: Tracing Denial of Service via Event Flooding

> A malicious container can flood the ring-buffer to cause a Denial of Service by forcing the system to drop events from other containers.

- **Severity:** Medium 4.8 (`CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:N/VI:L/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N`)
- **Exploited in the wild:** Not known
- **Login needed:** Any signed-in user
- **Attackable:** Local or same network only
- **Victim action needed:** Not needed
- **Fix available:** No
- **Published:** 12 Mar 2026
- **Updated:** 13 Mar 2026
- **Also known as:** GHSA-wv52-frfv-mfh4

## What is CVE-2026-31890?

CVE-2026-31890 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in inspektor-gadget, published on 12 Mar 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

### Official description

Inspektor Gadget is a set of tools and framework for data collection and system inspection on Kubernetes clusters and Linux hosts using eBPF. Prior to 0.50.1, in a situation where the ring-buffer of a gadget is – incidentally or maliciously – already full, the gadget will silently drop events. The include/gadget/buffer.h file contains definitions for the Buffer API that gadgets can use to, among the other things, transfer data from eBPF programs to userspace. For hosts running a modern enough Linux kernel (>= 5.8), this transfer mechanism is based on ring-buffers. The size of the ring-buffer for the gadgets is hard-coded to 256KB. When a gadget_reserve_buf fails because of insufficient space, the gadget silently cleans up without producing an alert. The lost count reported by the eBPF operator, when using ring-buffers – the modern choice – is hardcoded to zero. The vulnerability can be used by a malicious event source (e.g. a compromised container) to cause a Denial Of Service, forcing the system to drop events coming from other containers (or the same container). This vulnerability is fixed in 0.50.1.

Weakness: CWE-770 (Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling), CWE-223 (Omission of Security-relevant Information)

## Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-31890?

It affects 1 product.


Products: Linuxfoundation Inspektor Gadget.

## How do I fix CVE-2026-31890?

No fix has been published for CVE-2026-31890 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

## Is CVE-2026-31890 being exploited?

It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2026-31890 exists.

## Other vulnerabilities in inspektor-gadget

- [CVE-2026-25996](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-25996/): Inspektor Gadget uses unsanitized ANSI Escape Sequences In `columns` Output Mode (medium 6.9)
- [CVE-2026-24905](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-24905/): Inspektor Gadget has a Command Injection vulnerability in Makefile.build (medium 6.6)

## Fix prompt for AI coding agents

```text
Check this codebase for CVE-2026-31890 and fix it if it is affected.

What it is: CVE-2026-31890 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in inspektor-gadget, published on 12 Mar 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Exploitation: It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2026-31890 exists.

Affected product: inspektor-gadget. No package-level version data is available, so check the vendor advisory linked from the reference page.

Task:
1. Search the dependency manifests and lockfiles (for example package.json, package-lock.json, requirements.txt, poetry.lock, uv.lock, pom.xml, build.gradle, go.mod, Cargo.lock, Gemfile.lock) and any Dockerfiles for the affected packages, including transitive dependencies.
2. If an affected version is in use, upgrade it to the fixed version for its release line with the project's package manager, so the lockfile is regenerated. Prefer the smallest upgrade that fixes it.
3. If there is no fix, or the upgrade would break the build, do not guess: explain the risk and the safest workaround instead.
4. Run the tests and summarise what changed and why.
5. If nothing in the project is affected, say so and change nothing.

Reference: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-31890/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-31890/index.md)
```

## Sources

- CVE record: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-31890
- NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-31890
- OSV: https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2026-31890

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From sbomify Insights: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-31890/
Summaries are generated and may contain mistakes; the official description above is the record.