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

What is CVE-2026-24834?

CVE-2026-24834 is a critical vulnerability in kata-containers, published on 19 Feb 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

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.

Weakness: CWE-281, CWE-732

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-24834?

3 open source packages ship an affected version, including github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/src/runtime. It affects 1 product.

Products include Katacontainers Kata Containers.

How do I fix CVE-2026-24834?

Upgrade github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/src/runtime to 0.0.0-20260219090056-6a672503973b or later.

Is CVE-2026-24834 being exploited?

It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2026-24834 exists.

Other vulnerabilities in kata-containers

• CVE-2026-24054 Other in kata-containers High 8.8
• CVE-2020-27151 Code injection in n/a High 8.8
• CVE-2026-44210 Kata Containers have VM Escape via virtiofsd Argument Injection through Default-Enabled Pod Annotations Medium 5.8

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as AZL-77976, GHSA-wwj6-vghv-5p64, GO-2026-4517.