Inspektor Gadget: malformed ELF crashes or exhausts memory in the privileged eBPF tracer

Impact

getUsdtInfo() parses the .note.stapsdt section of a target binary without checking that DescSize covers the three address fields, so an out-of-bounds slice panics, and it sizes allocations from untrusted NameSize and DescSize values, which can consume gigabytes. debug/elf is also called without panic recovery, so other malformed ELF structures terminate the process. Inspektor Gadget runs as a privileged DaemonSet, so an unprivileged container that ships a crafted binary can kill or balloon the node's tracing agent - on a GPU fleet that is the component feeding the runtime security and syscall telemetry operators rely on to see what tenants are doing, and losing it on a node is a blind spot rather than a reboot. Impact demonstrated is denial of service only: no code execution and no privilege escalation. Only deployments running custom gadgets with a SEC("usdt/...") section are affected; no gadget shipped by the project uses USDT probes.

Who can reach it

An unprivileged container on a node where a custom USDT gadget is attached to binaries it controls. No cluster credentials needed beyond the ability to place a file the gadget will parse; clusters not running custom USDT gadgets are not exposed.

What to do

Upgrade Inspektor Gadget to 0.53.1 and roll the DaemonSet - pods restart per node, workloads and GPU allocations are untouched. If an upgrade has to wait, stop using custom USDT gadgets, which removes the exposed code path entirely.

References

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