Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-16254 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-16254 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-16254?
- Medium severity, with a CVSS score of 4.3, published 20 July 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Quay Claircore; Red Hat Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security 4.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-16254?
- No fixed version is recorded yet. Check the vendor's advisory in the references below. If you run it, Junglewise drafts a mitigation that fits your setup and applies it once you approve, with senior security engineers behind it.
- How is CVE-2026-16254 attacked?
- It is attacked over the network, in a software library.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-16254?
- Check whether you run Quay Claircore. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.
Technical details
An out-of-bounds read vulnerability (CWE-125) exists in the apk package-database parser of Claircore. When the scanner encounters malformed data within a container layer, it triggers a Go panic due to an out-of-bounds slice access. Because this panic is not recovered within the indexing path, it causes the entire Clair indexer process to terminate. An attacker with the ability to submit a crafted container image for indexing can exploit this to cause a denial of service. While the impact may be mitigated by automatic container orchestration restarts (e.g., Kubernetes), it still results in a disruption of the indexing service.
Affected products
- Quay Claircore
- Red Hat Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security 4
Timeline
- 2026-07-20: disclosed: Vulnerability reported via Red Hat Bugzilla and NVD.