Critical Red Hat Quay Vulnerability Could Expose Private Container Images

Red Hat Quay is an enterprise container registry used to store, manage and distribute container images, allowing organizations to control who can download or upload images used in application development and deployment. The vulnerability affects deployments where the service responsible for managing signing keys is accessible to untrusted clients.

Attack mechanism

When anonymous access is enabled, an attacker without an account can obtain a registry token and exploit weaknesses in the key rotation mechanism to install their own trusted signing key. The attacker can then generate tokens granting read and write access to any repository, bypassing normal access restrictions.

This could expose private images and any credentials or other secrets stored in them, while also allowing attackers to overwrite images that other systems subsequently download. The malicious signing key can be configured without an expiration date and survives registry restarts unless removed.

Rotation also deletes the legitimate instance key as a side effect, and the attacker key can delete replacement instance keys

Mitigation challenges

Turning off anonymous access doesn't protect against this vulnerability, as any valid Quay account can still exploit the flaw. Changing passwords or regenerating robot tokens also does not invalidate an unauthorized signing key.

Red Hat recommends restricting access to the key-management service, reviewing logs for suspicious key changes, and removing unauthorized keys. However, the company warns that attackers could reinstall malicious keys until a fix is deployed. Fixes for this vulnerability and another Quay flaw (CVE-2026-110697) were merged into the project's GitHub repository on November 11.