A flaw was found in Podman. This issue may allow an attacker to create a specially crafted container that, when configured to share the same IPC with at least one other container, can create a large number of IPC resources in /dev/shm. The malicious container will continue to exhaust resources until it is out-of-memory (OOM) killed. While the malicious containers cgroup will be removed, the IPC resources it created are not. Those resources are tied to the IPC namespace that will not be removed until all containers using it are stopped, and one non-malicious container is holding the namespace open. The malicious container is restarted, either automatically or by attacker control, repeating the process and increasing the amount of memory consumed. With a container configured to restart always, such as podman run --restart=always, this can result in a memory-based denial of service of the system.
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Podman | Podman_project | * | 5.2.0 (including) |
| Libpod | Ubuntu | oracular | * |
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.