CVE-2025-62596: youki container escape and denial of service due to arbitrary write gadgets and procfs write redirects

Impact

youki’s apparmor handling performs insufficiently strict write-target validation, which—combined with path substitution during pathname resolution—can allow writes to unintended procfs locations.

Weak write-target check youki only verifies that the destination lies somewhere under procfs. As a result, a write intended for /proc/self/attr/apparmor/exec can succeed even if the path has been redirected to /proc/sys/kernel/hostname(which is also in procfs).

Path substitution While resolving a path component-by-component, a shared-mount race can substitute intermediate components and redirect the final target.

This is a different project, but the core logic is similar to the CVE in runc. Issues were identified in runc, and verification was also conducted in youki to confirm the problems. https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/security/advisories/GHSA-cgrx-mc8f-2prm

Credits

Thanks to Li Fubang (@lifubang from acmcoder.com, CIIC) and Tõnis Tiigi (@tonistiigi from Docker) for both independently discovering runc’s original vulnerability, as well as Aleksa Sarai (@cyphar from SUSE) for the original research into this class of security issues and solutions.