Skip to content
Fencer Vulns
medium 6.1

CVE-2023-38496 json

Apptainer's ineffective privileges drop when requesting container network

published 2023-07-25 3 y ago modified 2026-09-10 1 mo ago also GHSA-mmx5-32m4-wxvx , GO-2023-1965 , EUVD-2023-2102

cvss
6.1
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 17%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Apptainer is an open source container platform. Version 1.2.0-rc.2 introduced an ineffective privilege drop when requesting container network setup, therefore subsequent functions are called with root privileges, the attack surface is rather limited for users but an attacker could possibly craft a starter config to delete any directory on the host filesystems. A security fix has been included in Apptainer 1.2.1. There is no known workaround outside of upgrading to Apptainer 1.2.1.

Patch / fix

  • go github.com/apptainer/apptainer 1.2.1
  • apptainer Package Hub 15 SP5, openSUSE Leap 15.5 1.3.0-bp155.3.3.2
  • squashfuse Package Hub 15 SP5, openSUSE Leap 15.5 0.5.0-bp155.2.1
  • apptainer openSUSE Tumbleweed 1.2.1-1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:0244-1openSUSE-SU-2024:13073-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2023-38496 updated cvss 6.1

apptainer: Ineffective privileges drop when requesting container network

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2 y ago

Exploit prediction

0.26% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 17% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 6.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H
NVD 3.1 3.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
GitHub 3.1 6.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
go github.com/apptainer/apptainer
>=1.2.0, <1.2.1
1.2.1

Affected products

  • apptainer apptainer

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-271 Privilege Dropping / Lowering Errors
  • CWE-269 Improper Privilege Management

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.