- Researchers find 9.3/10 FLAW in Docker Desktop for Windows and MacOS
- The bug allows threats to compromise underlying hosts and falsify data
- A fix has been quickly released, so users should patcher now
Docker has corrected a vulnerability of critical gravity in its office application for Windows and MacOS, which could have allowed threat actors to fully take vulnerable hosts, to extract sensitive data, etc.
Vulnerability is described as a counterfeit counterfeit server (SSRF) and, according to the NVD, it “allows Linux containers in the process of local execution to access the Docker engine API via the Docker subnet configured”.
“A malicious container operating on Docker Desktop could access the Docker engine and launching additional containers without demanding that the Docker socket be mounted,” Docker said in a monitoring security notice. “This could allow unauthorized access to user files on the host system. Improved insulation of containers (ECI) does not reach this vulnerability. ”
Not all systems are affected in the same way
The bug was discovered and reported by the safety researcher Felix Boulet. It is now followed as CVE-2025-9074 and has received a gravity rating of 9.3 / 10 (critic).
However, a separate researcher, Philippe Dugre, stressed that the risk is not the same on all platforms, noting that it is actually a little larger on Windows, compared to MacOS.
This is due to the guarantees cooked in the macOS operating system. Dugre managed to create a file in the personal user directory on Windows, but not on MacOS:
“On Windows, since the Docker engine runs via WSL2, the attacker can set up the whole file system as an administrator, read any sensitive file and finally crush a DLL of the system to degenerate the attacker to the guest system administrator,” said Dugre.
“On MacOS, however, the Docker Desktop application always has an isolation layer and tries to mount a user directory invites the user to authorization. By default, the Docker application does not have access to the rest of the file system and does not run with administrative privileges, so the host is much safer than in the case of Windows,” he added.
Docker corrected it in version 4.44.3 of office, users are therefore invited to upgrade as soon as possible.
Via Bleeping Compompute
