Vulnerability · Published Aug 25, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M
CVE-2026-55588ORAS CLI: Cyclic Referrer Graph Can Cause Unbounded Recursion and Resource Consumption
Medium 6.5
In plain English
A medium-severity uncontrolled resource consumption in oras from oras-project. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.5% (higher than 45% of all known vulnerabilities). Fixed versions are available - upgrade the affected package.
Official description
ORAS (OCI Registry As Storage) is a CLI and library for managing artifacts in OCI registries. In ORAS CLI versions up to and including 1.3.2, the recursive referrer traversal does not track visited descriptors, so a malicious OCI registry that returns a cyclic referrer graph causes unbounded recursion and memory growth. This affects oras discover, whose recursive traversal is enabled by default because the --depth option defaults to 0 (unlimited), as well as the recursive referrer counting used by the oras backup and oras restore workflows. A cyclic graph can be as simple as A referring to B and B referring back to A. A malicious registry can use this to cause a client-side denial of service, exhausting CPU and memory and hanging automation or CI/CD pipelines that run ORAS against untrusted registry metadata. The vulnerability does not extend to code execution, artifact substitution, or integrity bypass. This issue has been fixed in version 1.3.3.
Affected packages & fixed versions
| Ecosystem | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Debian:13 | oras | no fix listed | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-55588 |
| Debian:14 | oras | 1.3.3-1 | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-55588 |
| Go | oras.land/oras | 1.3.3 | GHSA-298f-872v-2rcx |
| Go | oras.land/oras | 1.3.3 | GO-2026-6317 |
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| oras-project | oras | < 1.3.3 |
Weakness: CWE-400, CWE-674, CWE-835 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H