CVE-2026-33414
HighCVSS 7.8Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk45th percentile - higher than 45% of all known CVEs
Summary
Podman versions 4.8.0 through 5.8.1 contain a command injection vulnerability in the HyperV backend, where the VM image path is inserted into a PowerShell string without sanitization, allowing arbitrary PowerShell commands to be executed with Podman process privileges (SYSTEM on Windows).
Risk Assessment
An attacker controlling the VM image path can gain full SYSTEM-level control over the Windows system, leading to complete host compromise.
Recommendation
Upgrade Podman to version 5.8.2, which contains the fix.
Other vulnerabilities in Podman
See all- CVE-2026-19730Medium
The 'podman quadlet install --replace' command opens the existing Quadlet file without O_TRUNC, which on filesystems without reflink support (e.g., default XFS on RHEL) leads to incomplete overwriting. If the new Quadlet is shorter than the original, old data remains at the end of the file, and the command completes without warning.
- CVE-2026-57231High
Podman from version 1.8.1 to 5.8.4 contains a vulnerability where a container image with an environment variable consisting only of a key (no value) can trick Podman into passing that variable from the host into the container. Using an asterisk (*) as the key causes all host environment variables to be passed, allowing a malicious image to exfiltrate Podman environment variables from the session where the container is launched.
- CVE-2025-4953High
A flaw in Podman causes data written to `RUN --mount=type=bind` mounts during `podman build` to persist, making files created inside the container appear in the host's temporary build context directory.
- CVE-2025-9566High
A vulnerability in Podman allows an attacker to overwrite host files using the 'kube play' command when the kube file contains a Secret or ConfigMap volume mount with a symbolic link to a host file path. The attacker can control which file is overwritten but not the content written.
- CVE-2025-6032High
A flaw was found in Podman where the `podman machine init` command fails to verify the TLS certificate when downloading VM images from an OCI registry. This enables a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack.
- CVE-2024-11218High
A vulnerability in `podman build` and `buildah` allows container breakout via a race condition with --jobs=2 when building a malicious Containerfile. Even with SELinux enabled, it allows enumeration of files and directories on the host.
Original NVD description (English source)
Podman is a tool for managing OCI containers and pods. Versions 4.8.0 through 5.8.1 contain a command injection vulnerability in the HyperV machine backend in pkg/machine/hyperv/stubber.go, where the VM image path is inserted into a PowerShell double-quoted string without sanitization, allowing $() subexpression injection. Because PowerShell evaluates subexpressions inside double-quoted strings before executing the outer command, an attacker who can control the VM image path through a crafted machine name or image directory can execute arbitrary PowerShell commands with the privileges of the Podman process. On typical Windows installations this means SYSTEM-level code execution, and only Windows is affected as the code is exclusive to the HyperV backend. This issue has been patched in version 5.8.2.