CVE-2026-44778

LowCVSS 2.9

Published: 15/09/2026(UTC)Updated: 30/09/2026(UTC)Translated: 15/09/2026(UTC)NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk

0.63%

48th percentile - higher than 48% of all known CVEs

Summary

Inspektor Gadget from 0.28.0 until 0.53.1 has a flaw in the USDT note parser (pkg/uprobetracer/usdt.go). When a custom gadget with a SEC("usdt/...") eBPF section attaches to a crafted ELF binary, an unprivileged container can trigger an out-of-bounds panic or consume gigabytes of memory, crashing or exhausting the privileged Inspektor Gadget process.

Risk Assessment

An attacker controlling a container can cause denial of service (DoS) of the Inspektor Gadget process on the host, disrupting monitoring and inspection of the Kubernetes cluster or Linux host.

Recommendation

Upgrade Inspektor Gadget to version 0.53.1 or later; if you use custom USDT gadgets, consider removing them until the upgrade.

Other vulnerabilities in Inspektor Gadget

CVE-2026-53941Medium
Inspektor Gadget from version 0.27.0 to 0.53.1 has a vulnerability in the uprobe library resolver that can allow an unprivileged container to consume excessive CPU and block other containers from starting by supplying a crafted /etc/ld.so.cache file while an uprobe-based gadget is active. The parser in pkg/uprobetracer/ldcache_parser.go trusts EntryCount enough to perform excessive iteration, computes cache1Len with overflowing uint32 arithmetic, and repeatedly calls readStringFromBytes, where byte-by-byte immutable string concatenation produces quadratic work.

Original NVD description (English source)

Inspektor Gadget is a set of tools and framework for data collection and system inspection on Kubernetes clusters and Linux hosts using eBPF. From 0.28.0 until 0.53.1, the USDT note parser in pkg/uprobetracer/usdt.go can allow an unprivileged container to crash or exhaust the memory of the privileged Inspektor Gadget process when a custom gadget containing a SEC("usdt/...") eBPF section attaches to a crafted ELF binary. The getUsdtInfo() function reads the .note.stapsdt section without validating that DescSize is large enough for three address fields, allowing an out-of-bounds slice operation to panic, and it uses untrusted NameSize and DescSize values for allocations that can consume gigabytes of memory. The parser also invokes debug/elf without panic recovery, allowing other malformed ELF structures to terminate the process. No gadget shipped by Inspektor Gadget uses USDT probes, so only deployments using custom USDT gadgets are affected, and the demonstrated impact is denial of service rather than code execution or privilege escalation. This issue is fixed in version 0.53.1.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS