GCP News - 2026-05-11

Container breakout vulnerabilities CVE-2026-43284 and CVE-2026-43500 have been found in the Linux kernel, known as DirtyFrag. They allow an unprivileged local attacker to escalate to root on the host.

There are two exploit paths.

rxrpc exploit path (CVE-2026-43500): Container-Optimized OS is not vulnerable because the vulnerable module is not compiled in. Ubuntu nodes are vulnerable.

esp4 exploit path (CVE-2026-43284): Both Container-Optimized OS and Ubuntu are vulnerable, but the GKE default seccomp profile provides a mitigation that protects all Autopilot clusters and Standard clusters with Autopilot-managed node pools. The esp4 exploit path requires the user to have the ability to make the unshare syscall to obtain CAP_NET_ADMIN. Containers that use the RuntimeDefault SeccompProfile can’t call unshare and are unaffected. Containers that grant CAP_NET_ADMIN explicitly are affected.

Containers using GKE Sandbox are not impacted.

What should I do?

2026-06-24 Update: The following versions of GKE are updated with code to fix this vulnerability on Container-Optimized OS. Upgrade your Container-Optimized OS node pools to the following versions or later:

• 1.30.14-gke.2558000
• 1.31.14-gke.1967000
• 1.32.13-gke.1829000
• 1.33.12-gke.1059000
• 1.34.8-gke.1218000
• 1.35.5-gke.1057000
• 1.36.0-gke.2459000

Upstream kernel patches have only recently been released. Those patches are being built into GKE releases and this bulletin will be updated when they are available. In the interim, partial mitigations are available below. We do not recommend relying on containers as a security boundary, container breakout vulnerabilities are very common. Use GKE Sandbox instead.

If possible, migrate your workloads to run as non-root. If your container needs to be root, consider setting the pod.spec.securityContext.seccompProfile.type to RuntimeDefault for all workloads in your cluster. As an added security measure we also recommend setting the pod.spec.containers[*].securityContext.allowPrivilegeEscalation to false.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: default-pod
spec:
  securityContext:
    seccompProfile:
      type: RuntimeDefault
  containers:
  - name: mycontainer
    image: ubuntu
    securityContext:
      allowPrivilegeEscalation: false

Container breakout vulnerabilities CVE-2026-43284 and CVE-2026-43500 have been found in the Linux kernel, known as DirtyFrag. They allow an unprivileged local attacker to escalate to root on the host.

What should I do?

Container breakout vulnerabilities CVE-2026-43284 and CVE-2026-43500 have been found in the Linux kernel, known as DirtyFrag. They allow an unprivileged local attacker to escalate to root on the host.

What should I do?

Container breakout vulnerabilities CVE-2026-43284 and CVE-2026-43500 have been found in the Linux kernel, known as DirtyFrag. They allow an unprivileged local attacker to escalate to root on the host.

What should I do?

Container breakout vulnerabilities CVE-22026-43284 and CVE-2026-43500 have been found in the Linux kernel, known as DirtyFrag. They allow an unprivileged local attacker to escalate to root on the host.

What should I do?

There is no action required. GDC software for bare metal isn't affected as it does not bundle an operating system in its distribution.