CVE-2026-7374 PUBLISHED

Kubevirt: kubevirt virt-handler: privilege escalation and node compromise via symlink following vulnerability

Assigner: redhat
Reserved: 29.04.2026 Published: 26.05.2026 Updated: 26.05.2026

A flaw was found in KubeVirt's virt-handler component. This vulnerability allows an authenticated OpenShift user with edit permissions in a single namespace to exploit improper symlink validation when connecting to virtual machine console sockets. By replacing the console socket with a symlink to the host's container runtime (CRI-O) socket, an attacker can hijack virt-handler's privileged connection. This enables the attacker to access any Unix socket on the host, potentially leading to full control of the node and the entire cluster.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS Score: 9.9

Product Status

Vendor Red Hat
Product Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization 4
Versions Default: affected

Workarounds

Update cluster RBAC to not allow exec into virt-launcher pods.

Credits

  • This issue was discovered by Sarah Bennert (Red Hat) and Stoyan Nikolov (Red Hat).

References

Problem Types

  • Improper Link Resolution Before File Access ('Link Following') CWE