runC: Privilege escalation — GLSA 201701-34

A vulnerability in runC could lead to privilege escalation.

Affected packages

app-emulation/runc on all architectures
Affected versions < 1.0.0_rc2-r2
Unaffected versions >= 1.0.0_rc2-r2

Background

RunC is a CLI tool for spawning and running containers according to the OCI specification.

Description

A vulnerability was discovered in runC that allows additional container processes via ‘runc exec’ to be ptraced by the pid 1 of the container. This allows the main processes of the container, if running as root, to gain access to file-descriptors of these new processes.

Impact

An attacker, who is able to successfully escape the container or modify runC’s state before process initialization, could escalate privileges.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All runC users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-emulation/runc-1.0.0_rc2-r2"
 

References

Release date
January 12, 2017

Latest revision
January 12, 2017: 1

Severity
normal

Exploitable
remote

Bugzilla entries