CVE-2021-43784: medium-severity vulnerability in opencontainers runc
Overflow in netlink bytemsg length field allows attacker to override netlink-based container configuration
Published · Updated
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13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 6epss 1.8%
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.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:L
Affected products
opencontainers · runcRelated CVEs — opencontainers runc
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2024-21626HIGHrunc container breakout through process.cwd trickery and leaked fdsEPSS 18.9%CVE-2025-31133HIGHrunc container escape via "masked path" abuse due to mount race conditionsEPSS 1.2%CVE-2025-52565HIGHcontainer escape due to /dev/console mount and related racesEPSS 0.8%CVE-2025-52881HIGHrunc: LSM labels can be bypassed with malicious config using dummy procfs filesEPSS 0.8%CVE-2022-29162MEDIUMIncorrect Default Permissions in runcEPSS 0.4%CVE-2023-28642MEDIUMAppArmor bypass with symlinked /proc in runcEPSS 0.3%
References
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=2241https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/commit/9c444070ec7bb83995dbc0185da68284da71c554https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/commit/d72d057ba794164c3cce9451a00b72a78b25e1aehttps://github.com/opencontainers/runc/commit/f50369af4b571e358f20b139eea52d612eb55eedhttps://github.com/opencontainers/runc/security/advisories/GHSA-v95c-p5hm-xq8fhttps://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/12/msg00005.htmlhttps://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2024/02/msg00005.html