Medium [CVE-2026-17113] Cri-o: cri-o: unvalidated image env var causes daemon crash
This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-17113 affecting Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.
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Summary
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. 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. Under a specific internal condition, CRI-O skips validating whether a container image's environment variable entries are properly formatted before using them.
If an image contains a malformed environment variable, CRI-O crashes while processing it. Red Hat severity: Moderate — CVSS 6 (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H).
Weakness: CWE-1287. Affected Red Hat products: Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.
Red Hat does not currently list a fixing RHSA for this CVE.
Affected versions
No affected-version range was extracted from the source record. The vendor advisory is authoritative — check it before change work.
Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 3 hours ago·verify at source
Fixed versions
No fixed release is recorded yet. That does not prove no patch exists — confirm against the vendor advisory.
Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 3 hours ago·verify at source
Mitigation
The source record does not include mitigation steps. That is not a statement that no fix exists — read the vendor advisory below for the authoritative guidance.
Official advisory · medium-confidence parse· fetched 3 hours ago·verify at source
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