CVE-2020-1702

A malicious container image can consume an unbounded amount of memory when being pulled to a container runtime host, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux using podman, or OpenShift Container Platform. An attacker can use this flaw to trick a user, with privileges to pull container images, into crashing the process responsible for pulling the image. This flaw affects containers-image versions before 5.2.0.

Weakness

The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either:

• The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question.

• The second solution is simply difficult to effectively institute – and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply makes the attack require more resources on the part of the attacker.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/147.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/227.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/492.html

References

• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1792796
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1792796