A Guide to Container Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities

This guide reviews container privilege escalation risks, highlights recent critical CVEs that enable container-to-host escapes (runC and kernel/OverlayFS issues), and gives practical mitigation steps for Docker and Kubernetes — including no-new-privileges, dropping capabilities, read-only filesystems, user namespace remapping, securityContext settings, admission policies (e.g., Kyverno), and image/config scanning and runtime monitoring.