CVE-2026-48702: Rekor has an OOM Condition due to Unbounded gzip Decompression in Alpine APK Parsing Logic
The Package.Unmarshal() function in pkg/types/alpine/apk.go decompresses the signature and control gzip members of an APK file into in-memory buffers without bounding the total decompressed size. The existing max_apk_metadata_size check (default 1MB) is only applied to individual tar entry header sizes after decompression completes, so it does not prevent a decompression bomb from consuming unbounded heap memory.
An attacker can craft a gzip stream that compresses at a ~1000:1 ratio (e.g., 2MB compressed zeros → 2GB decompressed). When submitted as spec.package.content in an Alpine ProposedEntry, the server decompresses the full payload into memory during request processing, triggering a fatal Go runtime out-of-memory error or OS OOM-kill that cannot be caught by the server’s recover() middleware.
This is reachable via two unauthenticated endpoints:
- POST /api/v1/log/entries (createLogEntry)
- POST /api/v1/log/entries/retrieve (searchLogQuery)
Both invoke V001Entry.Canonicalize() → fetchExternalEntities() → apk.Unmarshal(packageData), which performs the unbounded decompression.
References
Code Behaviors & Features
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