Executive brief
Eclipse Ankaios is a container orchestration platform used to manage workloads across distributed systems. The platform's agent component creates communication pipes (FIFOs) with predictable names and locations; an unprivileged local attacker can pre-create these pipes before the agent starts, allowing them to impersonate workloads and potentially read or modify the cluster's configuration and desired state.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a TOCTOU (time-of-check-time-of-use) race condition and insecure reuse of predictable temporary file paths. Eclipse Ankaios agents create Control Interface named pipes (FIFOs) in predictable locations under `$TMPDIR/ankaios` (typically `/tmp`) using a path derived from the agent name and a hash of the workload's runtime configuration. The agent checks only for existence and file type, not ownership or permissions, when reusing existing paths. A local, unprivileged user with write access to the base directory can pre-create the directory hierarchy and FIFOs before the agent starts; the agent then treats these attacker-owned FIFOs as legitimate, allowing the attacker to complete the Control Interface handshake and issue requests with the targeted workload's configured permissions. The vulnerability affects versions 0.1.0 through 1.0.2 and was patched in v1.0.3.
Affected products
- Eclipse Ankaios 0.1.0 through 1.0.2
Timeline
- 2026-09-14: disclosed
- 2026-09-14: patched: Fixed in v1.0.3