Red Hat fixes Quay flaws exposing private container images

Red Hat has revealed two critical flaws in its Quay container registry that could allow attackers with access to a Quay registry to read and overwrite private container images across all repositories. The first vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-123710 (CVSS 9.8), stems from Quay’s token signing and key management: an attacker can plant their own key in the registry’s trusted set, with no expiry, enabling tokens signed with that key to access any repository.

The flaw means an attacker could obtain private images and any secrets stored in them, push or overwrite images, and have changes propagate to systems that subsequently pull those images. Red Hat notes that Quay’s anonymous access by default exacerbates the risk, and that the issue persists even if anonymous access is disabled because a planted key remains usable after password or token changes.

Red Hat has released fixed builds for eight Quay 3 branches and indicates affected deployments include standalone Quay, Quay deployed via the Quay Operator on OpenShift, and Red Hat OpenShift’s mirror registry.

The second flaw, CVE-2026-110697 (CVSS 9.9), concerns robot account tokens and tenant isolation. It allows a Quay user who can create a namespace to steal other tenants’ robot account tokens due to an unescaped SQL LIKE pattern in namespace handling. Decrypted tokens can then read, push, or overwrite other tenants’ images. The issue affects eight releases deemed fixed by Red Hat, though the CVE entry for this flaw did not list those advisories.

Red Hat advises interim mitigations such as restricting who can create namespaces with underscores, rotating affected robot tokens, analysing audit logs for key rotation events with null expirations, and removing unrecognised service keys, while upgrading to fixed releases. The upstream fix adds the missing key rotation check, requires key server keys to have expiry dates, and prevents altering a token’s audience. Found by Red Hat’s Dave O’Connor, both flaws are said to affect every Quay 3 and Quay 5 version. SOURCE_UNAVAILABLE