CVE-2025-9566

There's a vulnerability in podman where an attacker may use the kube play command to overwrite host files when the kube file container a Secrete or a ConfigMap volume mount and such volume contains a symbolic link to a host file path. In a successful attack, the attacker can only control the target file to be overwritten but not the content to be written into the file.

Binary-Affected: podman Upstream-version-introduced: v4.0.0 Upstream-version-fixed: v5.6.1

The Red Hat Product Security team has evaluated this vulnerability as having the Important severity. This happens because of the consequences of an successful attack and the low complexity (AC:L) on exploiting this vulnerability. Although the attacker cannot control the content written to the target file, depending on which file was targeted, the exploitation of this flaw may lead sensitive data corruption (I:H) and leading the system to crash resulting in a Denial of Service attack (A:H).

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

Red Hat advises to not run the podman kube play command with untrusted Kubernetes YAML file as input, additionally review the Kubernetes YAML file before running it through podman may help to catch maliciously crafted secretes or volumes that may be used to exploit this vulnerability.