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Critical · 9.4 CVE-2026-24834 EUVD-2026-7734GHSA-wwj6-vghv-5p64GO-2026-4517

Kata Container to Guest micro VM privilege escalation

Published Feb 19, 2026 · Updated Jul 15, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

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

VendorProductAffectedFixed
kata-containers kata-containers < 3.27.0 —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
openSUSE Leap 16.0 govulncheck-vulndb 0.0.20260723T184607-160000.1.1 openSUSE-SU-2026:21483-1
openSUSE Leap 15.6 govulncheck-vulndb 0.0.20260226T182644-150000.1.149.1 SUSE-SU-2026:0757-1

Azure Linux

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Azure Linux 3 kata-containers 3.19.1.kata2-6 —

Wolfi

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Wolfi rolling azurefile-csi-1.35 1.35.0-r1 —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
Go github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/src/runtime < 0.0.0-20260219090056-6a672503973b 0.0.0-20260219090056-6a672503973b GHSA-wwj6-vghv-5p64

Advisories 2

References