CVE-2026-92574
HighCVSS 8.8Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk44th percentile - higher than 44% of all known CVEs
Summary
A vulnerability in CRI-O checkpoint restore allows a user who can create a pod from a malicious checkpointed container to bypass the destination Kubernetes security context. The restored process may retain credentials, Linux capabilities, no_new_privs, and seccomp state from the checkpoint instead of enforcing the destination configuration.
Risk Assessment
This can allow execution with elevated privileges across the container security boundary, potentially leading to host or other container compromise. Affected versions include CRI-O 1.34+ and Red Hat OCP 4.17+.
Recommendation
Apply fixes as soon as they are released for supported CRI-O and OCP branches. Until then, restrict permissions to create pods from checkpoints and disable checkpoint restore if not required.
Other vulnerabilities in CRI-O
See all- CVE-2026-15801High
A vulnerability in CRI-O related to the container checkpoint and restore feature. When CRI-O is configured to restore containers from checkpoint archives, insufficient validation of restore metadata may allow a user with sufficient privileges to perform unintended operations on the host filesystem.
- CVE-2026-17113Medium
CRI-O has a vulnerability in environment-variable handling during container creation. When a CreateContainer request has a nil Envs field, CRI-O uses unfiltered config.Env entries from the OCI image, which can cause a Go panic and crash the crio daemon. This occurs when an entry lacks '='.
- CVE-2026-15809High
A flaw was found in CRI-O where the fix for a previous vulnerability (CVE-2022-4318) was incorrect, allowing it to be bypassed. An attacker capable of setting environment variables on a container can inject a newline character into the HOME variable, enabling arbitrary lines to be added to /etc/passwd.
- CVE-2025-4437Medium
There's a vulnerability in the CRI-O application where when a container is launched with securityContext.runAsUser specifying a non-existent user, CRI-O attempts to create the user, reading the container's entire /etc/passwd file into memory. If this file is excessively large, it can cause high memory consumption leading applications to be killed due to out-of-memory. As a result a denial-of-service can be achieved, possibly disrupting other pods and services running on the same host.
- CVE-2024-5154High
A flaw was found in cri-o. A malicious container can create a symbolic link to arbitrary files on the host via directory traversal (“../“). This flaw allows the container to read and write to arbitrary files on the host system.
Original NVD description (English source)
A vulnerability in CRI-O checkpoint restore allows a user who can create a pod from a malicious checkpointed container to bypass the destination Kubernetes security context. The restored process may retain credentials, Linux capabilities, no_new_privs, and seccomp state from the checkpoint instead of enforcing the destination configuration. This can allow execution with elevated privileges across the container security boundary. Affected upstream supported versions are CRI-O 1.34 and later. Downstream Red Hat products are affected from OCP 4.17 onward. Fixes have been applied to supported branches but are not yet released. Exploitation requires permission to create a pod from a malicious checkpoint image and checkpoint restore functionality to be available.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS