A flaw was found in Podman. An attacker can trigger a Denial of Service (DoS) by supplying a container image containing crafted metadata labels. Podman's auto-update mechanism improperly trusts these image labels to determine which system services to restart. If a user runs the malicious container and auto-update processes it, arbitrary system services are restarted with the user's privileges, potentially allowing an attacker to shut down the host system when Podman runs with administrative privileges.
Advisories

No advisories yet.

Fixes

Solution

No solution given by the vendor.


Workaround

Do not use podman auto-update on untrusted containers or images. Before running an image, inspect its labels with podman image inspect --format '.Config.Labels' and verify that the io.containers.autoupdate and PODMAN_SYSTEMD_UNIT labels are not set. For existing containers, inspect their labels and ensure that auto-update labels are configured correctly and only present on containers intended to use auto-update.

History

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 14:45:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description A flaw was found in Podman. An attacker can trigger a Denial of Service (DoS) by supplying a container image containing crafted metadata labels. Podman's auto-update mechanism improperly trusts these image labels to determine which system services to restart. If a user runs the malicious container and auto-update processes it, arbitrary system services are restarted with the user's privileges, potentially allowing an attacker to shut down the host system when Podman runs with administrative privileges.
Title Podman: untrusted image labels allow auto-update to restart arbitrary systemd units
First Time appeared Redhat
Redhat enterprise Linux
Redhat hummingbird
Redhat openshift
Weaknesses CWE-807
CPEs cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:10
cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:8
cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:9
cpe:/a:redhat:hummingbird:1
cpe:/a:redhat:openshift:4
Vendors & Products Redhat
Redhat enterprise Linux
Redhat hummingbird
Redhat openshift
References
Metrics cvssV3_1

{'score': 6.5, 'vector': 'CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H'}


Projects

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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: redhat

Published:

Updated: 2026-11-10T15:18:45.306Z

Reserved: 2026-11-04T11:15:46.453Z

Link: CVE-2026-121885

cve-icon Vulnrichment

No data.

cve-icon NVD

Status : Awaiting Analysis

Published: 2026-11-10T15:17:15.880

Modified: 2026-11-10T16:17:18.030

Link: CVE-2026-121885

cve-icon Redhat

No data.

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

No data.

Weaknesses