CVE-2026-24834CWE-732

Kata Container to Guest micro VM privilege escalation

Critical · published February 19, 2026

CVSS v3.1
9.4
EPSS
0%
Percentile
14.7
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
9.4 · CRITICAL
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00244 · 14.7th percentile
Weakness
CWE-732 · Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource
Published
2026-02-19T15:57Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 19 FEB 15:57Z
    Kata Container to Guest micro VM privilege escalation
    cvelistv5