Executive brief
Aqua Security Trivy is a security scanner used to find vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in software projects and container images. A flaw in how it handles Helm chart archives allows an attacker to provide a specially crafted file that, when scanned, consumes all available system memory. This results in a denial-of-service condition where the scanner crashes, potentially disrupting automated software delivery pipelines and incurring additional cloud infrastructure costs.
Technical details
Trivy's custom tar unpacker utilized `io.ReadAll` without size limits when processing Helm chart (`.tgz`) entries. An attacker can exploit this by placing a malicious, highly-compressed archive in a location scanned by Trivy (such as a git repository or container image build context). When Trivy attempts to parse the archive during a configuration or filesystem scan, the unbounded memory allocation causes the operating system's Out-Of-Memory (OOM) killer to terminate the process. The vulnerability was addressed in version 0.71.0 by replacing the custom unpacker with the official Helm SDK, which enforces per-entry and total size limits.
Affected products
- Aqua Security Trivy < 0.71.0
Timeline
- 2026-06-04: disclosed: Initial disclosure by nikpivkin
- 2026-06-25: advisory: NVD publication date
- 2026-07-14: patched: GitHub Advisory reviewed and updated with patch information
References
- https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy/security/advisories/GHSA-q3fv-x8vg-qqm4
- https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy/pull/10718
- https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy/commit/441251e51ae46cbcf7f436547e0a5766b25328b4
- https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy/releases/tag/v0.71.0
- https://api.github.com/repos/aquasecurity/trivy/security-advisories/GHSA-q3fv-x8vg-qqm4