Impact

Crossplanes image backend does not validate the byte contents of Crossplane packages. As such, Crossplane does not detect if an attacker has tampered with a Package.

Patches

The problem has been fixed in 1.11.5, 1.12.3 and 1.13.0, all the supported versions of Crossplane at the time of writing.

Workarounds

Only using images from trusted sources and keeping Package editing/creating privileges to administrators only, which should be both considered already best practices.

References

See ADA-XP-23-11 in the Security Audit's report.

Credits

This was reported as ADA-XP-23-11 by @AdamKorcz and @DavidKorczynski from Ada Logic and facilitated by OSTIF as part of the Security Audit sponsored by CNCF.

Impact

An high-privileged user could create a Package referencing an arbitrarily large image containing that Crossplane would then parse, possibly resulting in exhausting all the available memory and therefore in the container being OOMKilled.

The impact is low due to the high privileges required to be able to create the Package and the eventually consistency nature of controller.

Patches

The problem has been fixed in 1.11.5, 1.12.3 and 1.13.0, all the supported versions of Crossplane at the time of writing.

Workarounds

Only using images from trusted sources and keeping Package editing/creating privileges to administrators only, which should be both considered already best practices.

References

See ADA-XP-23-16 in the Security Audit's report.

Credits

This was reported as ADA-XP-23-16 by @AdamKorcz and @DavidKorczynski from Ada Logic and facilitated by OSTIF as part of the Security Audit sponsored by CNCF.