Impact A bug in containerd's image manifest processing causes an unrecovered panic when a child descriptor contains the "io.containerd.manifest.subject" annotation and a malformed digest. Pulling or importing such an image through the transfer service (including default CRI "PullImage" requests) crashes the containerd daemon. In Kubernetes environments, "kubelet" retries failed image pulls with backoff, allowing a pod referencing an untrusted image to repeatedly crash containerd and disrupt container operations on the worker node. ### Patches This bug has been fixed in containerd 2.4.2, 2.3.7, and 2.2.10. Users should update to these versions to resolve the issue. ### Workarounds Restrict pod image references to trusted registries (for example, using a Kubernetes "ValidatingAdmissionPolicy" or admission webhook) and only pull or import images from trusted sources. ### Credits The containerd project would like to thank @melihgurlek, LEI WANG (@ssst0n3) and Haoyuan Zhang (@zj1ng7), and OpenSec Intelligence who independently discovered and responsibly disclosed this issue in accordance with the "containerd security policy" (https://github.com/containerd/project/blob/main/SECURITY.md). ### For more information If you have any questions or comments about this advisory: * Open an issue in "containerd" (https://github.com/containerd/containerd/issues/new/choose) * Email us at "security@containerd.io" (mailto:security@containerd.io) To report a security issue in containerd: * "Report a new vulnerability" (https://github.com/containerd/containerd/security/advisories/new) * Email us at "security@containerd.io" (mailto:security@containerd.io)