CVE-2026-33711: medium-severity vulnerability in lxc incus
Incus vulnerable to local privilege escalation through VM screenshot path
Published · Updated
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13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 4.7epss 0.4%
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.
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
Affected products
lxc · incusRelated CVEs — lxc incus
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2026-23954HIGHIncus container image templating arbitrary host file read and writeEPSS 0.8%CVE-2026-48769CRITICALIncus has an arbitrary file write on its client due to trusted image hashEPSS 0.7%CVE-2026-48755CRITICALIncus has an argument injection in backup compression algorithm leading to AFW and ACEEPSS 0.7%CVE-2026-48753CRITICALIncus has an arbitrary file write via path traversal in S3 multipart uploadEPSS 0.7%CVE-2026-48752CRITICALIncus has arbitrary file read+write on host via templates/ symlink in malicious imageEPSS 0.7%CVE-2026-48750CRITICALIncus has an arbitrary file write on host via `exec-output` symlink in crafted imageEPSS 0.7%