CVE-2026-53495: containerd Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-53495 is a medium (CVSS 6.8) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in containerd. EPSS estimates a 0.16% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 4.9% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 14-09-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 14-09-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

containerd is an open-source container runtime. Prior to 1.7.35, 2.0.12, 2.2.8, and 2.3.5, containerd on Linux with the CRI plugin enabled can indefinitely block the drainExecSyncIO goroutine in internal/cri/server/container_execsync.go when CRI ExecSync is used by exec probes or lifecycle hooks that launch long-lived background child processes retaining standard input and output pipes. The input and output drain phase has no default timeout and did not stop when the request context was canceled, so repeated ExecSync invocations can accumulate blocked goroutines and host memory. The resulting resource exhaustion can cause the OOM killer to terminate containerd, leaving the container runtime unavailable until restart. Deployments not using containerd's CRI implementation and containers not running on Linux are not affected. This issue is fixed in versions 1.7.35, 2.0.12, 2.2.8, and 2.3.5.

• CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource ConsumptionThe product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.