What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-50540: Kata Containers: Config Path Annotation Arbitrary File Loading

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.6 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-08-07 · updated 2026-09-09
• Weakness: CWE-20

Description

Kata Containers is an open source project focusing on a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that perform like containers. Prior to version 4.0.0, kata-runtime is vulnerable to host code execution via an unvalidated configuration path annotation. The runtime accepts an arbitrary io.katacontainers.config_path pod annotation and loads the referenced host TOML file without restriction. As a result, a pod user who can place a file at a host-visible path can supply a configuration that selects an attacker-controlled hypervisor or virtio-fs daemon binary, executing code as root on the host. This issue is fixed in version 4.0.0.

Affected products

• kata-containers: before 4.0.0

References

• https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/commit/03cc670076099530f4e1e9cb22849afdafb20f65
• https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/security/advisories/GHSA-mp2j-xm59-qfgw
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/08/23/3
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/08/24/1

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