CVE-2026-18107

Criu: criu: container escape via rseq critical section hijack during checkpoint/restore

State
Published
Severity
7.8 High
Published
Jul 28, 2026
Updated
Sep 1, 2026
Reserved
Jul 28, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

A flaw was found in CRIU's handling of restartable sequences (rseq) during checkpoint/restore. A malicious process inside a container can register an rseq critical section that hijacks CRIU's parasite code injection during checkpoint, allowing it to spoof the process credentials saved in the checkpoint image. On restore, the container process gains elevated capabilities and zeroed UIDs/GIDs.

The practical impact on Red Hat products is limited by several factors: checkpoint/restore requires root privileges (podman) or cluster-admin RBAC (OpenShift) to trigger and cannot be initiated from within the container itself; on OpenShift prior to 4.17 the feature required explicit opt-in, and on 4.17+ the kubelet checkpoint API RBAC is not configured by default; OpenShift enforces user namespaces by default for regular workloads (hostUsers is gated behind admin-only SCCs), which makes the spoofed capabilities namespace-scoped and ineffective for privilege escalation; SELinux type enforcement (container_t) blocks privilege transitions independently of capabilities; seccomp filters persist through checkpoint/restore and cannot be corrupted via the parasite; and kernel mount namespace ownership checks on RHEL 9/10 kernels prevent mount-based container escape even with spoofed capabilities.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.17.8 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:Hredhat

Weaknesses

  • CWE-269 Improper Privilege Management

Affected Products

ProductVersions
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10Red Hat
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7Red Hat
      Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8Red Hat
        Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8Red Hat
          Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9Red Hat
            Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4Red Hat
              Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4Red Hat
                Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4Red Hat

                  References

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