CVE-2021-43784

mediumpriority · track · 21EPSS 0.018 · 78 %ileDEEURUUS
grimoire priorityP3 · Track
Exploitable?
—
no known exploitation
Likely / severe?
1.80% (78th) EPSS
CVSS 6 · medium
Is it mine?
18 products
Check your exposure
Who says so?
6 sources
cnnvd · enisa_euvd · fstec_bdu · osv

EPSS · scored 2026-10-23

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.

01

cvss

Technical severity, 0–10. One row per scoring source.

6.0
010

base score 0–10 · higher = more severe · hover a vector to decode

v2.06mediumAV:N/AC:M/Au:S/C:P/I:P/A:Pprimary · NVD / NIST USexploitability 6.8 · impact 6.4
v3.15mediumCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:Lprimary · NVD / NIST USexploitability 1.6 · impact 3.4
v3.15mediumAV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:Lsecondary · FSTEC (BDU) RU
v3.16mediumCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:Lsecondary · ENISA EU
v3.16mediumCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:Lsecondary · security-advisories@github.comexploitability 1.8 · impact 3.7
v3.16mediumCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:Lsecondary · OSV
v3.14.6mediumCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L/E:Usecondary · CVSS-BT (t0sche)
02

ssvc

A stakeholder decision — act, attend, or track — from exploitation and impact.

Trackcoordinatorcisa_ssvcUS
03

weaknesses

The CWE weakness classes this flaw belongs to.

04

affected products (18)

Products and version ranges known to be affected.

05

advisories (3)

Vendor and ecosystem advisories describing this.

  • WID-SEC-W-2022-0510IBM DB2: Mehrere SchwachstellenDeutsch2022-06-29csaf · cert_bundDE

    Ein entfernter, anonymer, authentisierter oder lokaler Angreifer kann mehrere Schwachstellen in IBM DB2 ausnutzen, um Dateien zu manipulieren, Sicherheitsmaßnahmen zu umgehen, vertrauliche Informationen offenzulegen, einen Denial-of-Service-Zustand auszulösen, willkürlichen Code mit erhöhten Rechten auszuführen, Informationen falsch darzustellen und beliebigen Code auszuführen.

  • GHSA-v95c-p5hm-xq8fOverflow in netlink bytemsg length field allows attacker to override netlink-based container configuration in RunC2021-12-07ghsa · osvUS

    ### Impact In runc, [netlink](https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/netlink.7.html) is used internally as a serialization system for specifying the relevant container configuration to the C portion of our 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. Prior to 9c444070ec7bb83995dbc0185da68284da71c554, in practice it was fairly difficult to specify an arbitrary-length netlink message with most container runtimes. The only user-controlled byte array was the namespace paths attributes which can be specified in runc's `config.json`, but as far as we can tell no container runtime gives raw access to that configuration setting -- and having raw access to that setting **would allow the attacker to disable namespace protections entirely anyway** (setting them to `/proc/1/ns/...` for instance). In addition, each namespace path is limited to 4096 bytes (with only 7 namespaces supported by runc at the moment) meaning that even with custom namespace paths it appears an attacker still cannot shove enough bytes into the netlink bytemsg in order to overflow the uint16 counter. However, out of an abundance of caution (given how old this bug is) we decided to treat it as a potentially exploitable vulnerability with a low severity. After 9c444070ec7bb83995dbc0185da68284da71c554 (which was not present in any release of runc prior to the discovery of this bug), all mount paths are included as a giant netlink message which means that this bug becomes significantly more exploitable in more reasonable threat scenarios. The main users impacted are those who allow untrusted images with untrusted configurations to run on their machines (such as with shared cloud infrastructure), though as mentioned above it appears this bug was not practically exploitable on any released version of runc to date. ### Patches The patch for this is d72d057ba794164c3cce9451a00b72a78b25e1ae and runc 1.0.3 was released with this bug fixed. ### Workarounds To the extent this is exploitable, disallowing untrusted namespace paths in container configuration should eliminate all practical ways of exploiting this bug. It should be noted that untrusted namespace paths would allow the attacker to disable namespace protections entirely even in the absence of this bug. ### References * commit d72d057ba794 ("runc init: avoid netlink message length overflows") * https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=2241 ### Credits Thanks to Felix Wilhelm from Google Project Zero for discovering and reporting this vulnerability. In particular, the fact they found this vulnerability so quickly, before we made a 1.1 release of runc (which would've been vulnerable) was quite impressive. ### For more information If you have any questions or comments about this advisory: * Open an issue in [our repo](https://github.com/opencontainers/runc)

  • GO-2022-0274Namespace restriction bypass in github.com/opencontainers/runc2022-07-15vendor · osvUS

    An attacker with partial control over the bind mount sources of a new container can bypass namespace restrictions.

06

also known as (6)

Other names and identifiers for this entity.

07

sources

Which sources assert this record, and when.

08

references (29)

External citations — patches, advisories, analysis.

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