CVE-2026-55686

Podman: WORKDIR symlink traversal vulnerability

Podman is a tool for managing OCI containers and pods. From 3.0.0 until 5.7.1, running a malicious container image where the WORKDIR path contains a symlink can create a directory or modify ownership on the host filesystem. Modified ownership is less likely to happen as that requires help from an untrusted/malicious process that mutates the host filesystem tree during dereferencing of the WORKDIR path, to trigger a race condition. This vulnerability is fixed in 5.7.1.

Affected

podman-container-tools · podman

CVSS v3.1 GITHUB

5.3 MEDIUMCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N

EPSS

0.40% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, 33rd percentile

Published

2026-06-26

Proof-of-concept exploits (1)

• advisories/GHSA-q6r4-3wmg-fwcq

Security advisories

• podman-container-tools/podman/security/advisories/GHSA-q6r4-3wmg-fwcq
• podman-container-tools/podman/commit/d18e44e9abb3bf5b7294aa70806e1368fdddfdd0

References

• CVE Record
• NVD entry