What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-24834: Kata Container to Guest micro VM privilege escalation

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2026-02-19 · updated 2026-07-15
• Weakness: CWE-732

Description

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 products

• kata-containers: before 3.27.0 — fixed in 3.27.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: kata-containers 3.27.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/commit/6a672503973bf7c687053e459bfff8a9652e16bf
• https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/releases/tag/3.27.0
• https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/security/advisories/GHSA-wwj6-vghv-5p64
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-24834
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2441025
• https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-24834.json

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