A flaw was found in CRI-O's container-creation environment-variable handling ("mergeEnvs" in "server/utils.go", consumed by "setupContainerEnvironmentAndWorkdir" in "server/container_create.go"). When a "CreateContainer" request supplies a "nil" CRI "Envs" field, CRI-O falls back to using the target OCI image's "config.Env" entries unfiltered, in contrast to the normal merge path, which validates each entry for a "key=value" form before use. An OCI image whose "config.Env" contains an entry with no "=" character (e.g. a bare "NOEQUALS" string) causes CRI-O to split that entry into a single-element slice and then index its second element, which is out of range. This triggers an unrecovered Go runtime panic in the "crio" daemon process, crashing it and terminating the container-runtime service for all workloads on the node until it is restarted.