CVE-2026-55588
ORAS CLI: Cyclic Referrer Graph Can Cause Unbounded Recursion and Resource Consumption
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.
| CWE | CWE-400 CWE-674 CWE-835 |
| Vendor | oras-project |
| Product | oras |
| Published | Aug 25, 2026 |
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CVSS v3 Breakdown
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H