CVE-2026-55588ORAS 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.

CVSS

6.5 MEDIUM (v3.1, CNA)CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Weakness (CWE)

CWE-400, CWE-674, CWE-835

Known exploited

Not in CISA's KEV catalog

EPSS (exploitation in the next 30 days)

Not loaded for this CVE

Assigned by

GitHub_M

NVD analysis

Deferred

Record last updated

Aug 27, 2026

First seen by InfoSec Signals

Oct 9, 2026

The CVE record on cve.org · NVD's entry

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