Cybersecurity researchers have found a bypass for a now-patched safety vulnerability within the NVIDIA Container Toolkit that may very well be exploited to interrupt out of a container’s isolation protections and achieve full entry to the underlying host.
The brand new vulnerability is being tracked as CVE-2025-23359 (CVSS rating: 8.3). It impacts the next variations –
- NVIDIA Container Toolkit (All variations as much as and together with 1.17.3) – Fastened in model 1.17.4
- NVIDIA GPU Operator (All variations as much as and together with 24.9.1) – Fastened in model 24.9.2
“NVIDIA Container Toolkit for Linux comprises a Time-of-Test Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) vulnerability when used with default configuration, the place a crafted container picture might achieve entry to the host file system,” the corporate mentioned in an advisory on Tuesday.
“A profitable exploit of this vulnerability would possibly result in code execution, denial of service, escalation of privileges, data disclosure, and information tampering.”
Cloud safety agency Wiz, which shared further technical specifics of the flaw, mentioned it is a bypass for one more vulnerability (CVE-2024-0132, CVSS rating: 9.0) that was addressed by NVIDIA in September 2024.
In a nutshell, the vulnerability permits dangerous actors to mount the host’s root file system right into a container, granting them unfettered entry to all information. Moreover, the entry will be leveraged to launch privileged containers and obtain full host compromise by way of the runtime Unix socket.
Wiz researchers safety researchers Shir Tamari, Ronen Shustin, and Andres Riancho mentioned their supply code evaluation of the container toolkit discovered that the file paths used throughout mount operations may very well be manipulated utilizing a symbolic hyperlink such that it makes it attainable to mount from exterior the container (i.e., the basis listing) right into a path inside “/usr/lib64.”
Whereas the entry to the host file system afforded by the container escape is read-only, this limitation will be circumvented by interacting with the Unix sockets to spawn new privileged containers and achieve unrestricted entry to the file system.
“This elevated stage of entry additionally allowed us to watch community site visitors, debug lively processes, and carry out a spread of different host-level operations,” the researchers mentioned.
Apart from updating to the most recent model, customers of the NVIDIA Container Toolkit are advisable to not disable the “–no-cntlibs” flag in manufacturing environments.