Denial-of-Service Vulnerability in CRI-O by Red Hat
CVE-2025-4437

5.7MEDIUM

Key Information:

Vendor

Red Hat
Status
Red Hat Openshift Container Platform 4
Vendor
CVE Published:
20 August 2025

What is CVE-2025-4437?

A vulnerability exists in the CRI-O application where the use of a non-existent user in the securityContext.runAsUser may trigger CRI-O to attempt user creation. This process reads the entire /etc/passwd file into memory, which can lead to excessive memory usage. When this occurs, it risks causing applications to be terminated due to out-of-memory conditions, potentially resulting in a denial-of-service scenario that disrupts other operational pods and services on the same host.

References

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2025-4437
vdb-entryx_refsource_REDHAT
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2375084
issue-trackingx_refsource_REDHAT

CVSS V3.1

Score:
5.7
Severity:
MEDIUM
Confidentiality:
None
Integrity:
None
Availability:
None
Attack Vector:
Network
Attack Complexity:
Low
Privileges Required:
Low
User Interaction:
Required
Scope:
Unchanged

Timeline

  • Vulnerability published

  • Vulnerability Reserved

Credit

Red Hat would like to thank Dongha Kim (BoB Project Team, Pirates) for reporting this issue.
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CVE-2025-4437 : Denial-of-Service Vulnerability in CRI-O by Red Hat