CVE-2026-24834 PUBLISHED

Kata Container to Guest micro VM privilege escalation

Assigner: GitHub_M
Reserved: 27.01.2026 Published: 19.02.2026 Updated: 19.02.2026

Kata Containers is an open source project focusing on a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that perform like containers. In versions prior to 3.27.0, an issue in Kata with Cloud Hypervisor allows a user of the container to modify the file system used by the Guest micro VM ultimately achieving arbitrary code execution as root in said VM. The current understanding is this doesn’t impact the security of the Host or of other containers / VMs running on that Host (note that arm64 QEMU lacks NVDIMM read-only support: It is believed that until the upstream QEMU gains this capability, a guest write could reach the image file). Version 3.27.0 patches the issue.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS Score: 9.4

Product Status

Vendor kata-containers
Product kata-containers
Versions
  • Version < 3.27.0 is affected

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-732: Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource CWE