CVE-2026-33711CWE-61

Incus vulnerable to local privilege escalation through VM screenshot path

Medium · published March 26, 2026

CVSS v4.0
4.7
EPSS
0%
Percentile
8.3
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v4.0
4.7 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:L/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:P
EPSS
0.00191 · 8.3th percentile
Weakness
CWE-61 · UNIX Symbolic Link (Symlink) Following
Published
2026-03-26T22:37Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 26 MAR 22:37Z
    Incus vulnerable to local privilege escalation through VM screenshot path
    cvelistv5