Denial-of-Service Vulnerability in CRI-O by Red Hat
CVE-2025-4437 
5.7MEDIUM
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
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.