Vulnerability Advisory : PowerShell Command Injection in Podman HyperV Machine with HIGH Attack Complexity

Podman is a tool for managing OCI containers and pods. Versions 4.8.0 through 5.8.1 contain a command injection vulnerability in the HyperV machine backend in pkg/machine/hyperv/stubber.go, where the VM image path is inserted into a PowerShell double-quoted string without sanitization, allowing $() subexpression injection. Because PowerShell evaluates subexpressions inside double-quoted strings before executing the outer command, an attacker who can control the VM image path through a crafted machine name or image directory can execute arbitrary PowerShell commands with the privileges of the Podman process. On typical Windows installations this means SYSTEM-level code execution, and only Windows is affected as the code is exclusive to the HyperV backend. This issue has been patched in version 5.8.2.