Impact

This attack is very similar in concept and application to CVE-2025-31133, except that it attacks a similar vulnerability in a different target (namely, the bind-mount of /dev/pts/$n to /dev/console as configured for all containers that allocate a console).

In runc version 1.0.0-rc3 and later, due to insufficient checks when bind-mounting /dev/pts/$n to /dev/console inside the container, an attacker can trick runc into bind-mounting paths which would normally be made read-only or be masked onto a path that the attacker can write to. This happens after pivot_root(2), so this cannot be used to write to host files directly -- however, as with CVE-2025-31133, this can load to denial of service of the host or a container breakout by providing the attacker with a writable copy of /proc/sysrq-trigger or /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern (respectively).

The reason that the attacker can gain write access to these files is because the /dev/console bind-mount happens before maskedPaths and readonlyPaths are applied.

Additional Findings

While investigating this issue, runc discovered some other theoretical issues that may or may not be exploitable, as well as taking the opportunity to fix some fairly well-known issues related to consoles.

Issue 1: Problematic Usage of os.Create

Go provides an os.Create function for creating files, which older code in runc (dating back to the original libcontainer from the early 2010s) had a tendency to use fairly liberally. os.Create implies O_CREAT|O_TRUNC but by design it does not apply O_NOFOLLOW nor O_EXCL, meaning if the target is swapped with a malicious symlink runc can be tricked into truncating host files (which can lead to denial of service attacks, among other concerns).

Runc conducted an audit of all os.Create usages in runc and found some suspicious usages related to device inodes, but based on runc's testing these were not exploitable in practice. Runc now has custom code lints to block any os.Create usage in runc, and plan to do a further audit of any other plain os.* operation usage throughout runc after this advisory becomes public.

CVE-2024-45310 was a similar attack but without the O_TRUNC component (which resulted in a "Low" severity) -- a similar attack being exploitable would've been much more severe.

Issue 2: Malicious /dev/pts/$n Inode Attacks (TIOCGPTPEER)

The (very) classic API for constructing consoles involves first opening /dev/ptmx for reading and writing. This allocates a new pseudo-terminal and the returned file descriptor is the "master" end (which is used by higher-level runtimes to do I/O with the container).

Traditionally, in order to get the "slave" end, you do ioctl(ptm, TIOCGPTN) to get the pseudo-terminal number and then open the file in /dev/pts/ with the corresponding base-10 decimal number of the number returned by TIOCGPTN. The naive way of doing this is vulnerable to very basic race attacks where /dev/pts/$n is replaced with a different pseudo-terminal or other malicious file.

In order to provide a mechanism to mitigate this risk, Aleksa Sarai (@cyphar from SUSE) implemented TIOCGPTPEER back in 2017 to provide a race-free way of doing the last TIOCGPTN step by opening the peer end of the pseudo-terminal directly. However, at the time it was believed to be too impractical to implement this protection in runc due to its no-monitor-process architecture (unlike runtimes like LXC which made use of TIOCGPTPEER almost immediately). While working on this advisory, runc found a way to make TIOCGPTN usage on pre-4.13 kernels still safe against race attacks and so have implemented both TIOCGPTPEER support as well as safe TIOCGPTN support as a fallback.

Another possible target of attack would be replacing /dev/ptmx or /dev/pts/ptmx with a different inode and tricking runc into trying to operate on it. This is very similar to the core issue in CVE-2025-31133 and had a similar solution.

Runc's analysis was that while this attack appears to be potentially problematic in theory, it seems unlikely to actually be exploitable due to how consoles are treated (runc tries to do several pseudo-terminal-specific ioctls and will error out if they fail -- which happens for most other file types). In principle you could imagine a DoS attack using a disconnected NFS handle but it seems impractical to exploit. However, runc felt it prudent to include a solution (and this also provides a safe mechanism to get the source mount for the /dev/console bind-mount issue at the beginning of this advisory).

Patches

This advisory is being published as part of a set of three advisories:

• CVE-2025-31133
• CVE-2025-52881
• CVE-2025-52565

The patches fixing this issue have accordingly been combined into a single patchset. The following patches from that patchset resolve the issues in this advisory:

• db19bbed5348 ("internal/sys: add VerifyInode helper")
• ff94f9991bd3 ("*: switch to safer securejoin.Reopen")
• 531ef794e4ec ("console: use TIOCGPTPEER when allocating peer PTY")
• 398955bccb7f ("console: add fallback for pre-TIOCGPTPEER kernels")
• 9be1dbf4ac67 ("console: avoid trivial symlink attacks for /dev/console")
• de87203e625c ("console: verify /dev/pts/ptmx before use")
• 01de9d65dc72 ("rootfs: avoid using os.Create for new device inodes")
• aee7d3fe355d ("ci: add lint to forbid the usage of os.Create")

runc 1.2.8, 1.3.3, and 1.4.0-rc.3 have been released and all contain fixes for these issues. As per runc's new release model, runc 1.1.x and earlier are no longer supported and thus have not been patched.

Mitigations

• Use containers with user namespaces (with the host root user not mapped into the container's user namespace). This will block most of the most serious aspects of these attacks, as the procfs files used for the container breakout use Unix DAC permissions and user namespaced users will not have access to the relevant files.

An attacker would still be able to bind-mount host paths into the container but if the host uids and gids mapped into the container do not overlap with ordinary users on the host (which is the generally recommended configuration) then the attacker would likely not be able to read or write to most sensitive host files (depending on the Unix DAC permissions of the host files). Note that this is still technically more privilege than an unprivileged user on the host -- because the bind-mount is done by a privileged process, the attacker would be able to get access to directories whose parents may have denied search access (i.e., they may be able to access paths inside a chmod 700 directory that would normally block them from resolving subpaths).

Runc would also like to take this opportunity to re-iterate that runc strongly recommend all users use user namespaced containers. They have proven to be one of the best security hardening mechanisms against container breakouts, and the kernel applies additional restrictions to user namespaced containers above and beyond the user remapping functionality provided. With the advent of id-mapped mounts (Linux 5.12), there is very little reason to not use user namespaces for most applications. Note that using user namespaces to configure your container does not mean you have to enable unprivileged user namespace creation inside the container -- most container runtimes apply a seccomp-bpf profile which blocks unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER) inside containers regardless of whether the container itself uses user namespaces.

Rootless containers can provide even more protection if your configuration can use them -- by having runc itself be an unprivileged process, in general you would expect the impact scope of a runc bug to be less severe as it would only have the privileges afforded to the host user which spawned runc.

• For non-user namespaced containers, configure all containers you spawn to not permit processes to run with root privileges. In most cases this would require configuring the container to use a non-root user and enabling noNewPrivileges to disable any setuid or set-capability binaries. (Note that this is runc's general recommendation for a secure container setup -- it is very difficult, if not impossible, to run an untrusted program with root privileges safely.) If you need to use ping in your containers, there is a net.ipv4.ping_group_range sysctl that can be used to allow unprivileged users to ping without requiring setuid or set-capability binaries.

• Do not run untrusted container images from unknown or unverified sources.

• The default containers-selinux SELinux policy mitigates this issue, as (unlike CVE-2025-31133) the /dev/console bind-mount does not get relabeled and so the container process cannot write to the bind-mounted procfs file by default.

  Please note that CVE-2025-52881 allows an attacker to bypass LSM labels, and so this mitigation is not that helpful when considered in combination with CVE-2025-52881.

• The default AppArmor policy used by Docker and Podman does not mitigate this issue (as access to /dev/console) is usually permitted. Users could create a custom profile that blocks access to /dev/console, but such a profile might break regular containers.

  Please note that CVE-2025-52881 allows an attacker to bypass LSM labels, and so the mitigation provided with a custom profile is not that helpful when considered in combination with CVE-2025-52881.

Other Runtimes

As this vulnerability boils down to a fairly easy-to-make logic bug,runc has provided information to other OCI (crun, youki) and non-OCI (LXC) container runtimes about this vulnerability.

Based on discussions with other runtimes, it seems that crun and youki may have similar security issues and will release a co-ordinated security release along with runc. LXC appears to also be vulnerable in some aspects, but their security stance is (understandably) that non-user-namespaced containers are fundamentally insecure by design.

Credits

Thanks to Lei Wang (@ssst0n3 from Huawei) and Li Fubang (@lifubang from acmcoder.com, CIIC) for discovering and reporting the main /dev/console bind-mount vulnerability, as well as Aleksa Sarai (@cyphar from SUSE) for discovering Issues 1 and 2 and the original research into these classes of issues several years ago.

References

• GHSA-qw9x-cqr3-wc7r
• opencontainers/runc@01de9d6
• opencontainers/runc@398955b
• opencontainers/runc@531ef79
• opencontainers/runc@9be1dbf
• opencontainers/runc@aee7d3f
• opencontainers/runc@db19bbe
• opencontainers/runc@de87203
• opencontainers/runc@ff94f99
• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-52565