CVE-2026-49237 (GCVE-0-2026-49237)
Vulnerability from cvelistv5 – Published: 2026-05-28 13:22 – Updated: 2026-05-28 15:15
VLAI
EPSS
VEX
Title
Local Privilege Escalation in Canonical Multipass
Summary
An issue was discovered in Canonical Multipass for macOS before version 1.16.3 due to an incomplete fix for CVE-2025-5199. While the patch in version 1.16.0 updated the ownership of the multipassd daemon binary to root:wheel, five co-located binaries (multipass, qemu-img, qemu-system-aarch64, qemu-system-x86_64, and sshfs_server) in /Library/Application Support/com.canonical.multipass/bin/ retain ownership by the installing user and remain writable. Because the root LaunchDaemon (com.canonical.multipassd.plist) configures a PATH environment variable that prioritizes this user-writable directory and invokes these auxiliary binaries by their bare names, a local attacker can replace an auxiliary binary (such as qemu-img) with a malicious wrapper. When the root daemon subsequently triggers the binary during routine execution (e.g., via multipass launch), the malicious code executes with root privileges, leading to local privilege escalation.
Severity
7.8 (High)
SSVC
Exploitation: none
Automatable: no
Technical Impact: total
CISA Coordinator · CISA-ADP (v2.0.3)
Decision recorded 2026-05-28 15:15 UTC
CWE
- CWE-276 - Incorrect default permissions
Assigner
References
1 reference
| URL | Tags |
|---|---|
| https://github.com/canonical/multipass/security/a… | vendor-advisory |
Impacted products
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