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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.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 — —
Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 — —
Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 — —
Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 — —
Red Hat Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 — —
Red Hat Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 5 — —

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.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian 14 criu 4.2-5 —
Debian 13 criu No fix yet —
Debian 12 criu No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 criu No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS criu No fix yet —
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS criu No fix yet —
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS criu No fix yet —
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS criu No fix yet —

Amazon Linux

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Amazon Linux 2023 crit +5 3.17.1-1.amzn2023.0.4 ALAS2023-2026-2126

Azure Linux

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Azure Linux 3 criu No fix yet —

Public exploits

Exploit or proof-of-concept code for this vulnerability is publicly available, which lowers the bar for attackers. Treat it as a reason to patch sooner.

Third-party code, not reviewed by us. Public PoCs are sometimes fake or contain malware. Read the code first and run it only in an isolated lab, against systems you are authorised to test.

GitHub 1 repository

  • robalb/criu-exploit ★ 3 · Sep 27, 2026

    Universal container escape exploit targeting the CRIU container checkpoint/restore system - CVE-2026-18107

Sources: PoC-in-GitHub, Metasploit Framework, Exploit-DB — updated daily. Only links are listed; no exploit code is hosted here.

Advisories 1

References