CVE-2026-24834

Kata Container to Guest micro VM privilege escalation

MEDIUM 5.2EPSS 0.2%

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.

Affected: kata-containers
CVSS v4.0 GitHub: 5.2 MEDIUMCVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:H/AT:P/PR:L/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:N/SC:H/SI:H/SA:H
CVSS v3.1 NVD: 8.8 HIGHCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS v3.1 CNA: 9.3 CRITICALCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS: 0.24% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, 15th percentile
Published: 2026-02-19
Updated: 2026-07-15

Proof-of-concept exploits (1)

advisories/GHSA-wwj6-vghv-5p64

CVE-2026-24834

Proof-of-concept exploits (1)

Security advisories

References