CVE-2021-20291

MEDIUM

containers/storage < 1.28.1 - Denial of Service via Malicious Tar Archive Processing

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

Description

A deadlock vulnerability was found in 'github.com/containers/storage' in versions before 1.28.1. When a container image is processed, each layer is unpacked using `tar`. If one of those layers is not a valid `tar` archive this causes an error leading to an unexpected situation where the code indefinitely waits for the tar unpacked stream, which never finishes. An attacker could use this vulnerability to craft a malicious image, which when downloaded and stored by an application using containers/storage, would then cause a deadlock leading to a Denial of Service (DoS).

References (6)

Core 6
Core References
Issue Tracking, Patch, Third Party Advisory x_refsource_misc
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1939485
Exploit, Third Party Advisory x_refsource_misc
https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/cve-2021-20291/

Scores

CVSS v3 6.5
EPSS 0.0103
EPSS Percentile 77.5%
Attack Vector NETWORK
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Details

CWE
CWE-667
Status published
Products (6)
containers/storage 0 - 1.28.1Go
fedoraproject/fedora 33
fedoraproject/fedora 34
redhat/enterprise_linux 8.0
redhat/openshift_container_platform 4.0
storage_project/storage < 1.28.1
Published Apr 01, 2021
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026