CVE-2026-57231High· 7.5▾ TwilightPodman: Malformed Image can trick podman run into leaking host environment variables into the container
▾ Twilight zone — High severity, or a signal on a lesser flaw
impact 41.3 · likelihood 0.1 · exploitation 0
Need a working PoC? Pro members can cast a request and our team develops one — it lands right here.
Disclosure to exploitation, from the record and what we observed since indexing it.
Disclosed via GHSA
0.4%
An container image that contains a environment variable with just a key and no value can trick podman into passing that variable from the host into the container. This is made worse by the fact that using an asterisk (*) will cause podman to pass all host variables into the container. So essentially a malicious image can exfiltrate all podman environment variables that are set in the session from where the container is launched.
podman run allows --env VAR1 or --env VAR* which will read the variable values from the current environment and then passes them into the container. However because the same parsing logic was reused for the image config env section that means that an image variable could also gain access to that.
That image spec requires the env variables to be in the form of key=value, so to address this invalid formatted variables get rejected and the container will not run.
Fixed in https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/commit/6c431b73dbf8e4b20b778644d7a80caebdb75050
Do not run untrusted images. Before running an image consider inspecting the config with podman image inspect --format '{{.Config.Env}}' <image> and check for any variables that do not have a value assigned.
github.com/containers/podman/v5 < 5.8.4go.podman.io/podman/v6 < 6.0.0github.com/containers/podman/v4 <= 4.9.5github.com/containers/podman/v3 <= 3.4.7github.com/containers/podman/v2 <= 2.2.1github.com/containers/podman >= 1.8.1, < 5.8.4Upgrade to a patched release:
github.com/containers/podman/v5 5.8.4go.podman.io/podman/v6 6.0.0Connected by shared product, vendor, weakness, or advisory.
CVE-2026-55686Medium· 5.3Podman: WORKDIR symlink traversal vulnerability
CVE-2022-1227High· 8.8Podman publishes a malicious image to public registries
CVE-2021-25122High· 7.5When responding to new h2c connection requests, Apache Tomcat versions 10.0.0-M1 to 10.0.0, 9.0.0.M1 to 9.0.41 and 8.5.0 to 8.5.61 could duplicate request headers and a limited amount of request body from one request to another meaning u…
CVE-2022-31746Medium· 6.5Internal URLs are protected by a secret UUID key, which could have been leaked to web page through the Referrer header
CVE-2022-27649High· 7.5Podman's default inheritable capabilities for linux container not empty
CVE-2022-27651Medium· 6.8Non-empty default inheritable capabilities for linux container in Buildah