CVE-2026-55588: oras-project oras Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-55588 is a medium (CVSS 6.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in oras-project oras. EPSS estimates a 0.54% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 44.4% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 25-08-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 27-08-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

ORAS (OCI Registry As Storage) is a CLI and library for managing artifacts in OCI registries. In ORAS CLI versions up to and including 1.3.2, the recursive referrer traversal does not track visited descriptors, so a malicious OCI registry that returns a cyclic referrer graph causes unbounded recursion and memory growth. This affects oras discover, whose recursive traversal is enabled by default because the --depth option defaults to 0 (unlimited), as well as the recursive referrer counting used by the oras backup and oras restore workflows. A cyclic graph can be as simple as A referring to B and B referring back to A. A malicious registry can use this to cause a client-side denial of service, exhausting CPU and memory and hanging automation or CI/CD pipelines that run ORAS against untrusted registry metadata. The vulnerability does not extend to code execution, artifact substitution, or integrity bypass. This issue has been fixed in version 1.3.3.

• CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource ConsumptionThe product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
• CWE-674Uncontrolled RecursionThe product does not properly control the amount of recursion that takes place, consuming excessive resources, such as allocated memory or the program stack.
• CWE-835Loop with Unreachable Exit Condition ('Infinite Loop')The product contains an iteration or loop with an exit condition that cannot be reached, i.e., an infinite loop.