Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-17113 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-17113 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-17113?
- Medium severity, with a CVSS score of 6, published 24 August 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- CRI-O CRI-O.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-17113?
- 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-2026-17113 attacked?
- It is attacked over the network, in a hosted service.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-17113?
- Check whether you run CRI-O. 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
CRI-O's `mergeEnvs` function in `server/utils.go` fails to validate environment-variable entries when a CreateContainer request supplies a nil CRI Envs field. In this fallback path, entries from the OCI image's `config.Env` are used directly without the validation checks present in the normal merge path. If an image's config.Env contains a malformed entry lacking an `=` character (e.g., a bare string like `NOEQUALS`), the code splits it into a single-element slice and then attempts to index the second element, causing an out-of-bounds access. This triggers an unrecovered Go runtime panic in the crio daemon process, crashing the container-runtime service and preventing all containers on the node from running until the daemon is manually restarted. The vulnerability requires the ability to create a container with a malicious OCI image, but no valid CRI Envs field.
Affected products
- CRI-O CRI-O
Timeline
- 2026-08-24: disclosed