CVE-2026-49238

high

Description

An issue was discovered in Canonical Multipass before version 1.16.3. The host-side SFTP server component (sshfs_server), which executes with root privileges on the host, contains a path containment bypass vulnerability within its validate_path function in src/sshfs_mount/sftp_server.cpp. The function performs a plain string prefix comparison on requested paths without path separator validation or dot-dot (..) normalization. A local attacker with root privileges inside a guest virtual machine can bypass the FUSE layer by injecting raw SFTP frames (such as an SSH_FXP_OPEN request) directly into the sshfs_server process stdin/stdout pipes via procfs. By supplying a path containing directory traversal sequences that match the allowed mount prefix, the attacker can force the host-side root process to resolve the traversal and open files outside the designated mount boundary. This allows a guest-side user to read arbitrary files on the host filesystem, resulting in a virtual machine escape.

References

https://github.com/canonical/multipass/security/advisories/GHSA-rhp2-23c4-r34w

Details

Source: Mitre, NVD

Published: 2026-05-28

Updated: 2026-06-01

Risk Information

CVSS v2

Base Score: 6.2

Vector: CVSS2#AV:L/AC:L/Au:S/C:C/I:C/A:N

Severity: Medium

CVSS v3

Base Score: 8.4

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

Severity: High

EPSS

EPSS: 0.00022