Executive brief
Podman is a tool used to manage and run software containers. A security flaw allows specially crafted container images to steal sensitive information, such as passwords or API keys, from the host computer's environment variables. This could lead to the exposure of private credentials used by the person or system launching the container.
Technical details
A vulnerability in Podman's environment variable parsing logic allows for host environment variable injection. The 'podman run' command's logic for importing host variables (using --env KEY or --env *) was incorrectly applied to the internal image configuration environment section. An attacker can create a malformed OCI image containing environment variables without values (e.g., 'SECRET_KEY' instead of 'SECRET_KEY=value'). When Podman runs such an image, it treats the missing value as a request to import the corresponding variable from the host's shell session. This can be escalated to exfiltrate all host environment variables if the image contains an asterisk (*) as a key. The fix enforces strict 'key=value' formatting for image-defined environment variables as required by the OCI image specification.
Affected products
- podman-container-tools Podman >= 1.8.1, < 5.8.4; >= 6.0.0-alpha, < 6.0.0
Timeline
- 2026-06-24: advisory: GitHub Security Advisory published
- 2026-06-26: disclosed: CVE published to NVD