Reliance on Untrusted Inputs in a Security Decision in Podman - CVE-2026-121885
Published: November 12, 2026
Vulnerability identifier: #VU166142
CSH Severity: Medium
CVSS v4: 6.7 [CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N]
CVE-ID: CVE-2026-121885
CWE-ID: CWE-807
Exploitation vector: Remote access
Exploit availability:
No public exploit available
Vulnerability details
The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to cause a denial of service by triggering restarts of arbitrary systemd units.
The vulnerability exists due to reliance on untrusted image labels in podman auto-update when determining whether a container has auto-update enabled and which systemd unit to restart. A remote attacker can trick a user into starting a container from an image containing crafted io.containers.autoupdate and PODMAN_SYSTEMD_UNIT labels and subsequently running podman auto-update to restart arbitrary systemd units with the privileges of the user running Podman.
Affected software
Podman
How to mitigate CVE-2026-121885
Install security update from vendor's website.
Podman - addressed in versions 5.8.10, 6.2.0