CVE-2026-24834 CRITICAL

CVE-2026-24834: Kata Container to Guest micro VM privilege escalation

Vendor Kata-Containers
Product kata-containers
Weakness CWE-732
Published February 19, 2026
Last update June 30, 2026

CVSS base score

9.4/10
Attack vector Local
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required None
User interaction None
Confidentiality High
Integrity High

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

What the vulnerability does

01Description

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.

Key dates

02Disclosure timeline

February 19, 2026 CVE published
June 30, 2026 Record updated