CVE-2026-114236 in Advanced Cluster Security
Summary
by MITRE • 10/21/2026
storage/pkg/archive.ApplyLayer and ApplyUncompressedLayer may, when processing corrupt or malicious inputs, leak a file descriptor; unbounded repeated calls can exhaust the process’ file descriptor limit
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 10/21/2026
The vulnerability identified in storage/pkg/archive involves improper resource management within the ApplyLayer and ApplyUncompressedLayer functions. These components are responsible for extracting archive contents into a target directory structure, a critical operation during container image processing or virtual machine disk manipulation. When these functions encounter corrupt archives or specifically crafted malicious inputs designed to exploit parsing logic errors, they fail to properly close file descriptors that have been opened during the extraction process. This failure represents a classic resource leak where system resources are allocated but never released back to the operating system upon completion of the operation or in response to an error condition.
From a technical perspective, this flaw aligns with CWE-775, which describes Missing Release of File Descriptor or Handle after Effective Lifetime. The underlying mechanism likely involves opening files for reading or writing during the traversal and extraction phases without ensuring that every open handle is explicitly closed via system calls such as close() in C-based implementations or equivalent resource disposal methods in Go. While individual instances might seem negligible, the cumulative effect becomes severe under specific conditions. If an attacker can trigger repeated invocations of these functions with malicious payloads, each invocation will leak one or more file descriptors depending on how many files were opened before the error occurred within that specific transaction.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is primarily centered around resource exhaustion leading to denial of service. As unbounded repeated calls are made against affected systems, the process consuming these resources will gradually approach its operating system-imposed limit for open file descriptors. Once this limit is reached, typically defined by ulimit settings or kernel parameters such as fs.file-max, the application can no longer allocate new file handles. This results in a complete inability to perform any further I/O operations, including reading configuration files, writing logs, accepting network connections, or processing additional archive layers. Consequently, services relying on these storage functions will become unresponsive effectively causing a denial of service condition for users and dependent systems.
This behavior also poses secondary risks related to system stability. In environments where multiple processes share the same user context or container runtime environment, exhausting file descriptors can impact neighboring processes that rely on shared resource pools. Furthermore, if the application attempts to recover from this state by restarting services without addressing the underlying leak in subsequent restarts, it may lead to rapid recurrence of the issue upon service initialization depending on how many handles remain open across process lifecycles.
Mitigation strategies must focus on ensuring robust resource cleanup regardless of execution path outcomes. Developers should implement deferred close operations or ensure that every file handle opened during archive processing is explicitly closed in error handling blocks and finally clauses. Code reviews should specifically target loop structures involved in extraction to verify that handles are not leaked when iteration breaks due to corruption detection. Additionally, implementing strict input validation before passing data to these functions can reduce the attack surface by rejecting malformed archives early in the pipeline.
From a defensive posture perspective, this vulnerability maps to MITRE ATT&CK technique T1496 Resource Hijacking under the sub-technique of resource exhaustion specifically targeting system resources like file descriptors rather than CPU or memory. Security teams should monitor for abnormal growth in open file descriptor counts within container runtimes and storage services as an indicator of potential exploitation attempts. Deploying runtime security tools that detect anomalous file handle creation rates can provide early warning signs before the limit is fully exhausted allowing administrators to intervene proactively.
Long-term remediation requires updating affected packages to versions where this leak has been patched by ensuring proper closure of all opened descriptors even when processing invalid inputs. Organizations should also consider implementing rate limiting on archive ingestion endpoints to prevent rapid successive calls that could accelerate resource depletion while patches are being deployed. Regular auditing of file descriptor usage patterns in production environments helps establish baselines making it easier to detect deviations indicative of such vulnerabilities or active exploitation attempts.