Vulnerability · Published Sep 15, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M
CVE-2026-53941Inspektor Gadget Uprobe gadgets: unprivileged container's ld.so.cache causes high CPU utilization and container startup DoS
Medium 6.9
In plain English
A medium-severity resource allocation without limits in inspektor-gadget from inspektor-gadget. 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
Inspektor Gadget is a set of tools and framework for data collection and system inspection on Kubernetes clusters and Linux hosts using eBPF. From 0.27.0 until 0.53.1, the uprobe library resolver can allow an unprivileged container to consume excessive CPU and block other containers from starting by supplying a crafted /etc/ld.so.cache file while an uprobe-based gadget is active. The parser in pkg/uprobetracer/ldcache_parser.go trusts EntryCount enough to perform excessive iteration, computes cache1Len with overflowing uint32 arithmetic, and repeatedly calls readStringFromBytes in pkg/uprobetracer/bytes.go, where byte-by-byte immutable string concatenation produces quadratic work. While this processing occurs, pkg/container-hook holds the fanotify container-start pause, allowing a crafted cache to delay startup for roughly a minute, prevent Docker from starting other containers, and degrade monitoring. Processing caches from already-running containers can still consume CPU but does not hold the new-container startup pause, and the advisory establishes no confidentiality or integrity impact. This issue is fixed in version 0.53.1.
Affected packages & fixed versions
| Ecosystem | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Go | github.com/inspektor-gadget/inspektor-gadget | 0.53.1 | GHSA-vjhx-2cqw-3q6q |
| Go | github.com/inspektor-gadget/inspektor-gadget | 0.53.1 | GO-2026-6254 |
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| inspektor-gadget | inspektor-gadget | >= 0.27.0, < 0.53.1 |
Weakness: CWE-770 · Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
References
- https://github.com/inspektor-gadget/inspektor-gadget/security/advisories/GHSA-vjhx-2cqw-3q6q x_refsource_CONFIRM
- https://github.com/inspektor-gadget/inspektor-gadget/pull/5547 x_refsource_MISC
- https://github.com/inspektor-gadget/inspektor-gadget/commit/2ca55021acf675b65040beff2a5ec348054be782 x_refsource_MISC
- https://github.com/inspektor-gadget/inspektor-gadget/releases/tag/v0.53.1 x_refsource_MISC