CVE-2022-23471

containerd is an open source container runtime. A bug was found in containerds CRI implementation where a user can exhaust memory on the host. In the CRI stream server, a goroutine is launched to handle terminal resize events if a TTY is requested. If the users process fails to launch due to, for example, a faulty command, the goroutine will be stuck waiting to send without a receiver, resulting in a memory leak. Kubernetes and crictl can both be configured to use containerds CRI implementation and the stream server is used for handling container IO. This bug has been fixed in containerd 1.6.12 and 1.5.16. Users should update to these versions to resolve the issue. Users unable to upgrade should ensure that only trusted images and commands are used and that only trusted users have permissions to execute commands in running containers.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
• For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
• When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
• To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

References

• https://github.com/containerd/containerd/commit/a05d175400b1145e5e6a735a6710579d181e7fb0
• https://github.com/containerd/containerd/security/advisories/GHSA-2qjp-425j-52j9
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202401-31