CyberRota Analysis
AI-GeneratedKata Containers versions prior to 4.0.0 are vulnerable due to an authorization bypass in the kata-agent related to confidential-guest memory management when the mem-agent feature is enabled. This flaw allows an untrusted host to manipulate in-guest memory management, potentially degrading the availability and performance of confidential workloads without breaching the agent-policy boundary. Organizations utilizing Confidential Containers with the mem-agent enabled should prioritize upgrading to version 4.0.0 to mitigate this risk.
Public Exploit Signal
A public exploit, PoC, GitHub repository or Metasploit reference was detected for this CVE.
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Original NVD Description
Kata Containers is an open source implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that perform like containers. In versions prior to 4.0.0, the kata-agent is vulnerable to an authorization bypass in confidential-guest memory management. In Confidential Containers (CoCo) deployments, the kata-agent enforces an OPA/Rego-based AgentPolicy that must authorize every ttRPC API call, forming the security boundary that prevents an untrusted host from directing the confidential guest. Two ttRPC methods introduced with the mem-agent feature are missing this authorization check, so an untrusted host can invoke them unconditionally regardless of the guest's policy configuration. When mem-agent is enabled (off by default), this lets the host tamper with in-guest memory management by forcing swap, aggressive eviction, or compaction, resulting in attacker-controlled availability and performance degradation of the confidential workload entirely outside the agent-policy boundary. The impact does not include memory disclosure or code execution, and severity is bounded by the precondition that mem-agent must be explicitly enabled. This issue is fixed in version 4.0.0.