Symlink Following Affecting podman-fips package, versions <5.8.3-r1


Severity

Recommended
low

Based on default assessment until relevant scores are available.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.19% (9th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-CHAINGUARDLATEST-PODMANFIPS-17683869
  • published30 Jun 2026
  • disclosed1 Jul 2026

Introduced: 30 Jun 2026

CVE-2026-41579  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-61  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade Chainguard podman-fips to version 5.8.3-r1 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream podman-fips package and not the podman-fips package as distributed by Chainguard. See How to fix? for Chainguard relevant fixed versions and status.

runc is a CLI tool for spawning and running containers according to the OCI specification. In versions prior to 1.3.6, 1.4.0-rc.1, 1.4.0-rc.12, 1.5.0-rc.1, and 1.5.0-rc.1, when setting up the container rootfs, setupPtmx and setupDevSymlinks call os.Remove and os.Symlink with a filepath.Join string which allow an image with /dev as a symlink to trick runc into deleting files called ptmx on the host or creating a hardcoded set of symlinks with specific names and targets in an arbitrary pre-existing host directory. This issue is not exploitable under Docker, because Docker creates a top-level read-only layer that masks any malicious /dev symlink present in the container image — unlike some other Linux container tooling, whose higher-level runtimes built on runc remain exposed to exploitation via a malicious image. This issue has been fixed in versions 1.3.6, 1.4.3 and 1.5.0.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1