Copyright © 2012 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved. Moderate 2026-07-28T18:21:00 criu: criu: container escape via rseq critical section hijack during checkpoint/restore 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H CWE-269

A flaw was found in CRIU's handling of restartable sequences (rseq) during checkpoint/restore. A malicious process inside a container can register an rseq critical section that hijacks CRIU's parasite code injection during checkpoint, allowing it to spoof the process credentials saved in the checkpoint image. On restore, the container process gains elevated capabilities and zeroed UIDs/GIDs. The practical impact on Red Hat products is limited by several factors: checkpoint/restore requires root privileges (podman) or cluster-admin RBAC (OpenShift) to trigger and cannot be initiated from within the container itself; on OpenShift prior to 4.17 the feature required explicit opt-in, and on 4.17+ the kubelet checkpoint API RBAC is not configured by default; OpenShift enforces user namespaces by default for regular workloads (hostUsers is gated behind admin-only SCCs), which makes the spoofed capabilities namespace-scoped and ineffective for privilege escalation; SELinux type enforcement (container_t) blocks privilege transitions independently of capabilities; seccomp filters persist through checkpoint/restore and cannot be corrupted via the parasite; and kernel mount namespace ownership checks on RHEL 9/10 kernels prevent mount-based container escape even with spoofed capabilities.

A flaw was found in CRIU's handling of restartable sequences (rseq) during checkpoint/restore. A malicious process inside a container can register an rseq critical section that hijacks CRIU's parasite code injection during checkpoint, allowing it to spoof the process credentials saved in the checkpoint image. On restore, the container process gains elevated capabilities and zeroed UIDs/GIDs. The practical impact on Red Hat products is limited by several factors: checkpoint/restore requires root privileges (podman) or cluster-admin RBAC (OpenShift) to trigger and cannot be initiated from within the container itself; on OpenShift prior to 4.17 the feature required explicit opt-in, and on 4.17+ the kubelet checkpoint API RBAC is not configured by default; OpenShift enforces user namespaces by default for regular workloads (hostUsers is gated behind admin-only SCCs), which makes the spoofed capabilities namespace-scoped and ineffective for privilege escalation; SELinux type enforcement (container_t) blocks privilege transitions independently of capabilities; seccomp filters persist through checkpoint/restore and cannot be corrupted via the parasite; and kernel mount namespace ownership checks on RHEL 9/10 kernels prevent mount-based container escape even with spoofed capabilities.

This vulnerability requires that checkpoint/restore functionality is enabled for the container runtime, which is not a default configuration in most Red Hat products. The exploit allows a malicious process inside a container to spoof its credentials during CRIU checkpoint by hijacking the rseq (restartable sequences) mechanism used during parasite code injection. On restore, the container process gains full capabilities within its namespace. SELinux type enforcement (container_t), seccomp filters, and kernel mount namespace ownership checks provide defense-in-depth that limits the practical impact even when the credential spoofing succeeds. On tested kernel 7.1, mount-based container escape was blocked despite spoofed capabilities. Red Hat would like to thank Alberto Ventafridda for reporting this issue. Disable checkpoint/restore functionality in the container runtime if it is not required. If checkpoint/restore is needed, ensure containers run with user namespaces enabled, which limits the scope of spoofed capabilities to the user namespace. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Fix deferred criu Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Fix deferred criu Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Fix deferred container-tools:rhel8/criu Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Fix deferred criu Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Fix deferred criu Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 Fix deferred criu Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 Fix deferred rhcos https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-18107 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-18107 https://github.com/checkpoint-restore/criu/pull/3097