When Kata Containers processes a container image that is malformed or has no layers, the on‑disk image store is fall‑backed to a bind‑mounted empty directory. The runtime interprets this bind mount as a block device. The host’s underlying block device is then hot‑plugged into the guest VM. In such a scenario the host filesystem can suffer from double inode allocation errors, and the block device may become mounted read‑only, compromising file integrity and availability. The flaw maps to CWE‑1287 and CWE‑754, which reflect misuse of block device semantics and inconsistent block device handling.

This vulnerability affects all versions of Kata Containers prior to 3.26.0. The product is provided by Kata Containers Ltd. and is identified in the CNA as kata-containers:kata-containers. Users running any earlier release are susceptible.

The CVSS score is 8.8, indicating high severity. EPSS predicts a very low but non‑zero exploitation probability (<1%) and the issue has not been listed in the CISA KEV catalog. The likely attack path involves an attacker being able to supply a malformed container image to the host, either by compromising a container registry or by obtaining write access to the host’s container image store. Successful exploitation would trigger the erroneous hot‑plug of the host block device into the VM, leading to filesystem corruption and a read‑only state that may impact host operations.