Podman is a tool for managing OCI containers and pods. From 3.0.0 until 5.7.1, running a malicious container image where the WORKDIR path contains a symlink can create a directory or modify ownership on the host filesystem. Modified ownership is less likely to happen as that requires help from an untrusted/malicious process that mutates the host filesystem tree during dereferencing of the WORKDIR path, to trigger a race condition. This vulnerability is fixed in 5.7.1.

The remote SUSE Linux SLES15 / SLES_SAP15 host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the SUSE-SU-2026:3536-1 advisory.

    - CVE-2026-55686: specially crafted image where the `WORKDIR` path contains a symlink allows for directory     creation and       ownership modification on the host filesystem (bsc#1268579).
    - CVE-2026-57231: specially crafted image can trick podman run into leaking host environment variables     into the       container (bsc#1269471).

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the SUSE security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed that are impacted by a vulnerability without a vendor supplied patch available.

  - Podman is a tool for managing OCI containers and pods. From 3.0.0 until 5.7.1, running a malicious     container image where the WORKDIR path contains a symlink can create a directory or modify ownership on     the host filesystem. Modified ownership is less likely to happen as that requires help from an     untrusted/malicious process that mutates the host filesystem tree during dereferencing of the WORKDIR     path, to trigger a race condition. This vulnerability is fixed in 5.7.1. (CVE-2026-55686)

Note that Nessus relies on the presence of the package as reported by the vendor.

There are packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability referenced in the following CVE:

  - Podman is a tool for managing OCI containers and pods. From 3.0.0 until 5.7.1, running a malicious
    container image where the WORKDIR path contains a symlink can create a directory or modify ownership on
    the host filesystem. Modified ownership is less likely to happen as that requires help from an
    untrusted/malicious process that mutates the host filesystem tree during dereferencing of the WORKDIR
    path, to trigger a race condition. This vulnerability is fixed in 5.7.1. (CVE-2026-55686)

ID	Name	Product	Family	Type	Severity
334466	SUSE SLES15 Security Update : podman (SUSE-SU-2026:3536-1)	Nessus	SuSE Local Security Checks	Local	high
323663	Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2026-55686	Nessus	Misc.	Local	medium
443518	SCA: security update for github.com/containers/podman/v5 (GHSA-q6r4-3wmg-fwcq)	Tenable Cloud Security	SCA Checks	Local	medium
443518	SCA: security update for github.com/containers/podman/v5 (GHSA-q6r4-3wmg-fwcq)	Tenable Self-Hosted Container Security	SCA Checks	Local	medium

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2026-55686

medium

Tenable Plugins

high

medium

medium

medium