What is CVE-2022-23471?

CVE-2022-23471 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Containerd, classified under Uncontrolled Resource Consumption. CVSS score: 5.7/10. Published 2022-12-07.

How severe is CVE-2022-23471?

Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.7 out of 10.

Is CVE-2022-23471 known to be exploited?

2 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

Resource exhaustion in Containerd

CVE-2022-23471

containerd is an open source container runtime. A bug was found in containerd's CRI implementation where a user can exhaust memory on the host. In the CRI stream server, a goroutine is launched to handle terminal resize events if a TTY is requested. If the user's process fails to launch due to, for example, a faulty command, the goroutine will be stuck waiting to send without a receiver, resulting in a memory leak. Kubernetes and crictl can both be configured to use containerd's CRI implementation and the stream server is used for handling container IO. This bug has been fixed in containerd 1.6.12 and 1.5.16. Users should update to these versions to resolve the issue. Users unable to upgrade should ensure that only trusted images and commands are used and that only trusted users have permissions to execute commands in running containers.

Vulnerability class: DoS (Denial of Service)

Published 2022-12-07 · last modified 2026-06-17.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 5.7 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.011 (63.4th percentile), scored 2026-09-29.

Low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, but still tracked. 63rd percentile — 63.4% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.010 · newest: 0.011 · change: +0.000

Affected products

Containerd — versions < 1.5.16, >= 1.6.0, < 1.6.12
Linuxfoundation Containerd

Weakness classification (CWE)

Public proof-of-concept exploits

References

github.com/containerd/containerd/security/advisories/GHSA-2qjp-425j-52j9 (Third Party Advisory)
github.com/containerd/containerd/commit/a05d175400b1145e5e6a735a6710579d181e7fb0 (Patch, Third Party Advisory)
security.gentoo.org/glsa/202401-31

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2022-23471?: CVE-2022-23471 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Containerd, classified under Uncontrolled Resource Consumption. CVSS score: 5.7/10. Published 2022-12-07.
How severe is CVE-2022-23471?: Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.7 out of 10.
Is CVE-2022-23471 known to be exploited?: 2 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.