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OpenAdvisories
Medium · 4.7 CVE-2026-33711 EUVD-2026-16462GHSA-q9vp-3wcg-8p4xGO-2026-4885

Incus vulnerable to local privilege escalation through VM screenshot path

Published Mar 26, 2026 · Updated Mar 27, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

Incus is a system container and virtual machine manager. Incus provides an API to retrieve VM screenshots. That API relies on the use of a temporary file for QEMU to write the screenshot to which is then picked up and sent to the user prior to deletion. As versions prior to 6.23.0 use predictable paths under /tmp for this, an attacker with local access to the system can abuse this mechanism by creating their own symlinks ahead of time. On the vast majority of Linux systems, this will result in a "Permission denied" error when requesting a screenshot. That's because the Linux kernel has a security feature designed to block such attacks, `protected_symlinks`. On the rare systems with this purposefully disabled, it's then possible to trick Incus intro truncating and altering the mode and permissions of arbitrary files on the filesystem, leading to a potential denial of service or possible local privilege escalation. Version 6.23.0 fixes the issue.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
lxc incus < 6.23.0 —

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
Debian 14 incus 6.0.6-2 —
Debian 13 incus No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 incus No fix yet —
Ubuntu 25.10 incus No fix yet —
Show 2 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu Pro 26.04 LTS incus No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 24.04 LTS incus No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
openSUSE Tumbleweed incus 6.23-1.1 openSUSE-SU-2026:10450-1
openSUSE Leap 16.0 govulncheck-vulndb 0.0.20260723T184607-160000.1.1 openSUSE-SU-2026:21483-1

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
Go github.com/lxc/incus all versions — GO-2026-4885
Go github.com/lxc/incus/v6 < 6.23.0 6.23.0 GHSA-q9vp-3wcg-8p4x

Advisories 2

References