GitHub Advisoryadvisory · crates.io
GHSA-5w4j-f78p-4wh9 Libcontainer is affected by capabilities elevation similar to GHSA-f3fp-gc8g-vw66
MEDIUM
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2025-27612
- Ecosystem
- crates.io
- Packages
- libcontainer
- Severity
- Moderate
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L
- Weaknesses
- CWE-276
- Reviewed
- 2025-03-21
Affected packages
• crates.io libcontainer: < 0.5.3 → fixed in 0.5.3
Description
Impact
In libcontainer, while creating a tenant container, the tenant builder accepts a list of capabilities to be added in the spec of tenant container. Code can be seen here . The logic here adds the given capabilities to all capabilities of main container if present in spec, otherwise simply set provided capabilities as capabilities of the tenant container.
However, GHSA-f3fp-gc8g-vw66 was opened on runc mentioning that setting inherited caps in any case for tenant container can lead to elevation of capabilities. For this, they added a fix here where they never set new inherited caps on tenant, and set ambient caps only if original container had inherited caps.
Similarly crun never sets inherited caps as can be seen here.
> [!NOTE]
This does not affect youki binary itself, as the exec implementation is partially broken and does not pass on the user-provided caps to tenant containers, this is only applicable if you are using libcontainer directly and using the tenant builder.
Workarounds
• Do not pass any user-provided capabilities to the tenant builder, in which case no capabilities will be set on tenant.
• Alternatively you can verify the capabilities of original container and filter the user passed capabilities before setting them on tenant.
References
• https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/security/advisories/GHSA-f3fp-gc8g-vw66
• https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/capabilities.7.html
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2025-27612 libcontainer is a library for container control. vulnerability
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-276 Incorrect Default Permissions weakness
References
- https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/security/advisories/GHSA-f3fp-gc8g-vw66 web
- https://github.com/youki-dev/youki/security/advisories/GHSA-5w4j-f78p-4wh9 web
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-27612 advisory
- https://github.com/youki-dev/youki/commit/747e342d2026fbf3a395db3e2a491ebef00082f1 web
- https://github.com/containers/crun/blob/3ec6298abd79e144fbf3fa6db90793ff4c0516f9/src/exec.c#L319 web
- https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/blob/986451c24e17c8d4be3c454f60b1f7be4af3e8b4/exec.go#L234-L242 web
- https://github.com/youki-dev/youki package
- https://github.com/youki-dev/youki/blob/9e63fa4da1672a78ca45100f3059a732784a5174/crates/libcontainer/src/container/tenant_builder.rs#L408 web
- https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/capabilities.7.html web