Skip to content
OpenAdvisories
Medium · 6.5 CVE-2026-41684 EUVD-2026-28373GHSA-x5r6-jr56-89pvGO-2026-5742

Incus: Nil Dereferences on Restore via Malformed YAML

Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 7, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

Incus is a system container and virtual machine manager. Prior to version 7.0.0, backup.GetInfo() trusts the inline backup/index.yaml config when present and only falls back to parsing the legacy backup/container/backup.yaml file if result.Config == nil. As a result, an archive can carry a valid inline config that passes the initial import preflight while also carrying a malformed legacy backup/container/backup.yaml file that is reparsed later from the restored file system. ParseConfigYamlFile() accepts YAML documents with no container section, and multiple downstream consumers then dereference. Container without checking for nil. Confirmed examples in the instance restore and import flow include backup.UpdateInstanceConfig() and internalImportFromBackup(). An authenticated user with permission to import instance backups may be able to crash the Incus daemon with a crafted backup archive whose inline backup/index.yaml is valid but whose extracted legacy backup.yaml omits container. The crash occurs in the restore path after archive extraction has begun. This issue has been patched in version 7.0.0.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
lxc incus < 7.0.0 —

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 7.0.0-1 —
Debian 13 incus 6.0.4-2+deb13u7 —
Debian 13 lxd 5.0.2+git20231211.1364ae4-9+deb13u6 —
Debian 12 lxd No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 incus No fix yet —
Ubuntu 25.10 incus No fix yet —
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS lxd No fix yet —
Show 4 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 —
Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS lxd No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS lxd No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
openSUSE Leap 16.0 govulncheck-vulndb 0.0.20260723T184607-160000.1.1 openSUSE-SU-2026:21483-1
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Alpine v3.24 incus 7.0.0-r0 —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
Go github.com/lxc/incus all versions — GO-2026-5742
Go github.com/lxc/incus/v6 all versions — GO-2026-5742
Go github.com/lxc/incus/v6/cmd/incusd <= 6.23.0 — GHSA-x5r6-jr56-89pv

Advisories 1

References