Medium severity · published Dec 6, 2021
CVE-2021-43784
runc is a CLI tool for spawning and running containers on Linux according to the OCI specification
5.0
CVSS
1.8%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
runc is a CLI tool for spawning and running containers on Linux according to the OCI specification. In runc, netlink is used internally as a serialization system for specifying the relevant container configuration to the `C` portion of the code (responsible for the based namespace setup of containers). In all versions of runc prior to 1.0.3, the encoder did not handle the possibility of an integer overflow in the 16-bit length field for the byte array attribute type, meaning that a large enough malicious byte array attribute could result in the length overflowing and the attribute contents being parsed as netlink messages for container configuration. This vulnerability requires the attacker to have some control over the configuration of the container and would allow the attacker to bypass the namespace restrictions of the container by simply adding their own netlink payload which disables all namespaces. The main users impacted are those who allow untrusted images with untrusted configurations to run on their machines (such as with shared cloud infrastructure). runc version 1.0.3 contains a fix for this bug. As a workaround, one may try disallowing untrusted namespace paths from your container. It should be noted that untrusted namespace paths would allow the attacker to disable namespace protections entirely even in the absence of this bug.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
High
Privileges
Low
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
Low
Integrity
Low
Availability
Low
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)1.8% · higher than 78% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
DL
Debian Linux · Debian
9.0 · source: NVD
RU
Runc · Linuxfoundation
before 1.0.3 · source: NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-43784
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2021-43784
Exploit
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=2241
Patch
https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/commit/9c444070ec7bb83995dbc0185da68284da71c554
Patch
https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/commit/d72d057ba794164c3cce9451a00b72a78b25e1ae
Patch
https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/commit/f50369af4b571e358f20b139eea52d612eb55eed
Patch
https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/security/advisories/GHSA-v95c-p5hm-xq8f
Vendor Advisory
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/12/msg00005.html
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