What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-4437: Cri-o: large /etc/passwd file may lead to denial of service

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.7 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-08-20 · updated 2026-09-26
• Weakness: CWE-770

Description

There's a vulnerability in the CRI-O application where when container is launched with securityContext.runAsUser specifying a non-existent user, CRI-O attempts to create the user, reading the container's entire /etc/passwd file into memory. If this file is excessively large, it can cause the a high memory consumption leading applications to be killed due to out-of-memory. As a result a denial-of-service can be achieved, possibly disrupting other pods and services running in the same host.

Affected products

• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.18: all versions

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2025-4437
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2375084

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