ORAS (OCI Registry As Storage) is a CLI and library for managing artifacts in OCI registries. In ORAS CLI versions up to and including 1.3.2, the recursive referrer traversal does not track visited descriptors, so a malicious OCI registry that returns a cyclic referrer graph causes unbounded recursion and memory growth. This affects oras discover, whose recursive traversal is enabled by default because the --depth option defaults to 0 (unlimited), as well as the recursive referrer counting used by the oras backup and oras restore workflows. A cyclic graph can be as simple as A referring to B and B referring back to A. A malicious registry can use this to cause a client-side denial of service, exhausting CPU and memory and hanging automation or CI/CD pipelines that run ORAS against untrusted registry metadata. The vulnerability does not extend to code execution, artifact substitution, or integrity bypass. This issue has been fixed in version 1.3.3.
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History

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:45:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description ORAS (OCI Registry As Storage) is a CLI and library for managing artifacts in OCI registries. In ORAS CLI versions up to and including 1.3.2, the recursive referrer traversal does not track visited descriptors, so a malicious OCI registry that returns a cyclic referrer graph causes unbounded recursion and memory growth. This affects oras discover, whose recursive traversal is enabled by default because the --depth option defaults to 0 (unlimited), as well as the recursive referrer counting used by the oras backup and oras restore workflows. A cyclic graph can be as simple as A referring to B and B referring back to A. A malicious registry can use this to cause a client-side denial of service, exhausting CPU and memory and hanging automation or CI/CD pipelines that run ORAS against untrusted registry metadata. The vulnerability does not extend to code execution, artifact substitution, or integrity bypass. This issue has been fixed in version 1.3.3.
Title ORAS CLI: Cyclic Referrer Graph Can Cause Unbounded Recursion and Resource Consumption
Weaknesses CWE-400
CWE-674
CWE-835
References
Metrics cvssV3_1

{'score': 6.5, 'vector': 'CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H'}


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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: GitHub_M

Published:

Updated: 2026-08-25T20:32:18.677Z

Reserved: 2026-06-16T23:18:03.169Z

Link: CVE-2026-55588

cve-icon Vulnrichment

No data.

cve-icon NVD

Status : Received

Published: 2026-08-25T21:17:02.350

Modified: 2026-08-25T21:17:02.350

Link: CVE-2026-55588

cve-icon Redhat

No data.

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

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Weaknesses