Red Hat Quay: SQL LIKE wildcard injection in robot account listing

Summary

Red Hat Quay builds an SQL LIKE pattern from namespace names in the robot account listing without escaping wildcard characters. An authenticated user who creates a namespace containing an underscore can match other tenants' namespaces and retrieve their robot accounts and decrypted authentication tokens. With these tokens, an attacker can read, push or overwrite images of the affected tenant without any action by the victim. Red Hat rates the flaw Critical (CVSS 9.9); the NVD assessment is still pending.

Affected

• Red Hat Quay 3 (default: affected)
• Red Hat Quay 5 (default: affected)
• Red Hat OpenShift Update Service (default: unaffected)
• Quay.io: already fixed by Red Hat

Fixed in

• Red Hat Quay 3.9.28
• Red Hat Quay 3.10.28
• Red Hat Quay 3.12.24
• Red Hat Quay 3.14.10
• Red Hat Quay 3.15.9
• Red Hat Quay 3.16.7
• Red Hat Quay 3.17.7
• Red Hat Quay 3.18.3
• Fixed version for Red Hat Quay 5: Unknown.

Workaround

• No complete workaround; the underlying flaw is not fixed by these steps.
• Restrict who can create organizations or namespaces containing an underscore.
• Rotate robot tokens for any namespace that collides with an underscore-containing namespace.
• Monitor registry activity for pulls or pushes that do not match expected robot usage.

Exploitation

• Exploited in the wild: Unknown.
• Public proof of concept: Unknown.
• Red Hat states that no elevated privileges or victim interaction are required.

Our recommendation

• Update Red Hat Quay to the fixed release for your version.
• Until the update is applied, restrict namespace creation and rotate robot tokens for colliding namespaces.
• Review registry logs for unexpected pulls or pushes using robot accounts.
• Check whether your Quay instance is reachable by untrusted users, as this raises the priority.

Public exploits iAttack code is publicly available (PoC on GitHub, Metasploit or Exploit-DB).

Links to third-party sites, not checked by us – exploit code can contain malware. Only use it in isolated test environments.

• Proof of concept on GitHub (1 repositories) iAttack code is publicly available (PoC on GitHub, Metasploit or Exploit-DB).
  googlesky/CVE-2026-110697

Research sources

• Red Hat CVE record CVE-2026-110697 access.redhat.com
• Red Hat Bugzilla 2552237 bugzilla.redhat.com
• Quay documentation: robot accounts docs.projectquay.io

Researched and written up in English and German by an AI (Claude by Anthropic) based on NVD, CISA, EPSS and the sources listed. The vendor information is authoritative. Researched on 11 Nov 2026, 18:21.