Kata Containers is an open source project focusing on a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that perform like containers. In versions prior to 3.27.0, an issue in Kata with Cloud Hypervisor allows a user of the container to modify the file system used by the Guest micro VM ultimately achieving arbitrary code execution as root in said VM. The current understanding is this doesn’t impact the security of the Host or of other containers / VMs running on that Host (note that arm64 QEMU lacks NVDIMM read-only support: It is believed that until the upstream QEMU gains this capability, a guest write could reach the image file). Version 3.27.0 patches the issue.

Kata Containers is an open source project focusing on a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that perform like containers. In versions prior to 3.26.0, when a container image is malformed or contains no layers, containerd falls back to bind-mounting an empty snapshotter directory for the container rootfs. When the Kata runtime attempts to mount the container rootfs, the bind mount causes the rootfs to be detected as a block device, leading to the underlying device being hotplugged to the guest. This can cause filesystem-level errors on the host due to double inode allocation, and may lead to the host's block device being mounted as read-only. Version 3.26.0 contains a patch for the issue.

An issue was discovered in Kata Containers through 1.11.3 and 2.x through 2.0-rc1. The runtime will execute binaries given using annotations without any kind of validation. Someone who is granted access rights to a cluster will be able to have kata-runtime execute arbitrary binaries as root on the worker nodes.