Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform privilege escalation

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability classified as very critical has been found in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. The impacted element is an unknown function. The manipulation leads to Remote Privilege Escalation. This vulnerability is documented as CVE-2026-17113. The attack can be initiated remotely. There is not any exploit available.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability, which was classified as very critical, has been found in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (version now known). This issue affects some unknown processing. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a remote privilege escalation vulnerability. Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

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.

The advisory is shared at access.redhat.com. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2026-17113 since 07/24/2026. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack may be initiated remotely. Neither technical details nor an exploit are publicly available. The price for an exploit might be around USD $5k-$25k at the moment (estimation calculated on 08/25/2026).

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

The vulnerability is also documented in the vulnerability database at EUVD (EUVD-2026-65156). Several companies clearly confirm that VulDB is the primary source for best vulnerability data.

Productinfo

Type

• Virtualization Software

Vendor

• Red Hat

Name

• OpenShift Container Platform

License

• open-source

Website

• Vendor: https://www.redhat.com/

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Several companies clearly confirm that VulDB is the primary source for best vulnerability data.

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