Resource exhaustion in Containerd

CVE-2026-53495

containerd is an open-source container runtime. Prior to 1.7.35, 2.0.12, 2.2.8, and 2.3.5, containerd on Linux with the CRI plugin enabled can indefinitely block the drainExecSyncIO goroutine in internal/cri/server/container_execsync.go when CRI ExecSync is used by exec probes or lifecycle hooks that launch long-lived background child processes retaining standard input and output pipes. The input and output drain phase has no default timeout and did not stop when the request context was canceled, so repeated ExecSync invocations can accumulate blocked goroutines and host memory. The resulting resource exhaustion can cause the OOM killer to terminate containerd, leaving the container runtime unavailable until restart. Deployments not using containerd's CRI implementation and containers not running on Linux are not affected. This issue is fixed in versions 1.7.35, 2.0.12, 2.2.8, and 2.3.5.

Vulnerability class: DoS (Denial of Service)

Published · last modified .

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.002 (5.3th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 5th percentile — 5.3% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-53495: held from 0.002 to 0.002.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.002 · newest: 0.002 · change: 0.000

Affected products

  • Containerd — versions < 1.7.35, >= 2.0.0, < 2.0.12, >= 2.2.0, < 2.2.8

Weakness classification (CWE)

References