CVE-2026-54448 Trivy: Helm chart tar bomb causes OOM via unbounded io.ReadAll in parser

Medium 6.9 Published 25 Jun 2026 Updated 25 Jun 2026

An attacker can cause a denial of service in Trivy by providing a malicious Helm chart archive that exhausts memory during scanning.

Exploited in the wild: Not known
Login needed: Not needed
Attackable: Over the internet
Victim action needed: A user has to click or open something
Fix: Available

What is CVE-2026-54448?

CVE-2026-54448 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in aquasecurity trivy, published on 25 Jun 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

Trivy is a security scanner. Prior to 0.71.0, when Trivy scans a Helm chart archive (.tgz), its custom tar unpacker reads each entry with io.ReadAll(tr) and no size limit. An attacker who can place a malicious .tgz file in the scanned path can craft a small compressed archive that decompresses to gigabytes, causing the Trivy process to be killed by the OS OOM killer. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.71.0.

Weakness: CWE-789, CWE-770

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-54448?

3 open source packages ship an affected version, including github.com/aquasecurity/trivy. It affects 1 product.

Package	Affected	Fixed in
`github.com/aquasecurity/trivy` Go	All versions	`0.71.0`
`github.com/aquasecurity/trivy` Go	All versions	`0.71.0`
`github.com/aquasecurity/trivy` Go	All versions	`0.71.0`

Products include Aquasec Trivy.

How do I fix CVE-2026-54448?

Upgrade github.com/aquasecurity/trivy to 0.71.0 or later.

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-2026-54448 being exploited?

It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2026-54448 exists.

CVE-2026-55092 Trivy: Path traversal via a crafted vulnerability database or other downloaded artifacts High 7.0

Sources

Also known as GHSA-q3fv-x8vg-qqm4, GO-2026-5983, MINI-27g2-8h39-4hmw, MINI-2xc6-8wqc-666q, MINI-3fq9-5895-89wv, MINI-3jpj-6qc2-26v6 and 20 more.