Vulnerability · Published Aug 20, 2025 · Assigned by redhat

CVE-2025-4437Cri-o: large /etc/passwd file may lead to denial of service

Medium 5.7

In plain English

A medium-severity resource allocation without limits in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 from Red Hat. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.2% (higher than 16% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 3.1)5.7Medium

Exploit odds (30 days)0.2%top 83.8% of all CVEs

Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none

Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

There's a vulnerability in the CRI-O application where when container is launched with securityContext.runAsUser specifying a non-existent user, CRI-O attempts to create the user, reading the container's entire /etc/passwd file into memory. If this file is excessively large, it can cause the a high memory consumption leading applications to be killed due to out-of-memory. As a result a denial-of-service can be achieved, possibly disrupting other pods and services running in the same host.

Affected packages & fixed versions

Ecosystem	Package	Fixed in	Advisory
Go	github.com/cri-o/cri-o	no fix listed	GHSA-8f93-j3fx-72f3
Go	github.com/cri-o/cri-o	no fix listed	GO-2025-3897

Affected products (as reported)

Vendor	Product	Versions
Red Hat	Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4	see references
Red Hat	Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4	see references
Red Hat	Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4	see references

Weakness: CWE-770 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2025-4437 vdb-entry, x_refsource_REDHAT
RHBZ#2375084 issue-tracking, x_refsource_REDHAT