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Medium · 6.0 CVE-2026-17113 EUVD-2026-65156

Cri-o: cri-o: unvalidated image env var causes daemon crash

Published Aug 24, 2026 · Updated Oct 21, 2026 · Assigned by redhat

Description

A flaw was found in CRI-O's container-creation environment-variable handling
(`mergeEnvs` in `server/utils.go`, consumed by `setupContainerEnvironmentAndWorkdir` in
`server/container_create.go`). When a `CreateContainer` request supplies a `nil` CRI
`Envs` field, CRI-O falls back to using the target OCI image's `config.Env` entries
unfiltered, in contrast to the normal merge path, which validates each entry for a
`key=value` form before use. An OCI image whose `config.Env` contains an entry with no
`=` character (e.g. a bare `NOEQUALS` string) causes CRI-O to split that entry into a
single-element slice and then index its second element, which is out of range. This
triggers an unrecovered Go runtime panic in the `crio` daemon process, crashing it and
terminating the container-runtime service for all workloads on the node until it is
restarted.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
— cri-o < 1.34.11, < 1.35.7, < 1.36.3 1.34.11
Red Hat Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 — —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

Azure Linux

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Azure Linux 3 cri-o No fix yet —

References