CVE-2026-53657 Lima: An arbitrary user in a QEMU VM could gain the root privilege in the VM via the guest agent socket
An arbitrary user in a Lima QEMU VM can gain root privileges by accessing the guest agent socket, allowing execution of arbitrary commands.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- An administrator
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-53657?
CVE-2026-53657 is a high-severity vulnerability in lima-vm lima, published on 10 Jul 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Lima launches Linux virtual machines, typically on macOS, for running containerd. Prior to 2.1.3, on an instance of Lima running with the qemu driver, an arbitrary user in the VM could access /run/lima-guestagent.sock when the guest agent is enabled, which could result in running arbitrary commands with root privileges in the VM because the guest agent socket provides tunneling for arbitrary addresses, including Unix socket addresses for privileged daemons like D-Bus. This issue is fixed in version 2.1.3.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-53657?
4 open source packages ship an affected version, including github.com/lima-vm/lima/v2 and github.com/lima-vm/lima.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
github.com/lima-vm/lima/v2 Go | All versions | 2.1.3 |
github.com/lima-vm/lima/v2 Go | All versions | 2.1.3 |
github.com/lima-vm/lima/v2 Go | All versions | 2.1.3 |
github.com/lima-vm/lima Go | All versions | None |
How do I fix CVE-2026-53657?
Upgrade github.com/lima-vm/lima/v2 to 2.1.3 or later.
Is CVE-2026-53657 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-53657 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-2j9v-p4xj-cjw2, GO-2026-6230.