Vulnerability · Published Aug 24, 2026 · Assigned by redhat

CVE-2026-17113Cri-o: cri-o: unvalidated image env var causes daemon crash

Medium 6.0

In plain English

A medium-severity security flaw in cri-o. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.1% (higher than 4% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 3.1)6.0Medium

Exploit odds (30 days)0.1%top 96.1% of all CVEs

Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none

Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official 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 (as reported)

Vendor	Product	Versions
	cri-o	0 – before 1.34.110 – before 1.35.70 – before 1.36.3
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
Red Hat	Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4	see references

Weakness: CWE-1287 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H

References

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-17113 vdb-entry, x_refsource_REDHAT
RHBZ#2506872 issue-tracking, x_refsource_REDHAT