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.
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Remediation
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References
History
Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:45:00 +0000
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | |
| Title | ORAS CLI: Cyclic Referrer Graph Can Cause Unbounded Recursion and Resource Consumption | |
| Weaknesses | CWE-400 CWE-674 CWE-835 |
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cvssV3_1
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Status: PUBLISHED
Assigner: GitHub_M
Published:
Updated: 2026-08-25T20:32:18.677Z
Reserved: 2026-06-16T23:18:03.169Z
Link: CVE-2026-55588
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