Detections
Analytics
CVE-2026-50540
critical
Description
Kata Containers is an open source project focusing on a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that perform like containers. Prior to version 4.0.0, kata-runtime is vulnerable to host code execution via an unvalidated configuration path annotation. The runtime accepts an arbitrary io.katacontainers.config_path pod annotation and loads the referenced host TOML file without restriction. As a result, a pod user who can place a file at a host-visible path can supply a configuration that selects an attacker-controlled hypervisor or virtio-fs daemon binary, executing code as root on the host. This issue is fixed in version 4.0.0.
References
https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/security/advisories/GHSA-mp2j-xm59-qfgw
https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/commit/03cc670076099530f4e1e9cb22849afdafb20f65