CVE-2023-27561

Severity: high (CVSS 7.0 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2023-03-03 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-706

Description

runc through 1.1.4 has Incorrect Access Control leading to Escalation of Privileges, related to libcontainer/rootfs_linux.go. To exploit this, an attacker must be able to spawn two containers with custom volume-mount configurations, and be able to run custom images. NOTE: this issue exists because of a CVE-2019-19921 regression.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 10.0
opencontainers runc: before 1.1.5 — fixed in 1.1.5
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 8.0, 9.0
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.18: 4.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: opencontainers runc 1.1.5. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

https://gist.github.com/LiveOverflow/c937820b688922eb127fb760ce06dab9
https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/issues/2197#issuecomment-1437617334
https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/issues/3751
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2023/03/msg00023.html
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/ANUGDBJ7NBUMSUFZUSKU3ZMQYZ2Z3STN/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/DHGVGGMKGZSJ7YO67TGGPFEHBYMS63VF/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/FNB2UEDIIJCRQW4WJLZOPQJZXCVSXMLD/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/FYVE3GB4OG3BNT5DLQHYO4M5SXX33AQ5/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/I6BF24VCZRFTYBTT3T7HDZUOTKOTNPLZ/
https://gist.github.com/LiveOverflow/c937820b688922eb127fb760ce06dab9
https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/issues/2197#issuecomment-1437617334
https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/issues/3751

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