CVEvulnerability

CVE-2026-49237

7.8 HIGH Published 2026-05-28 Modified 2026-10-14 Official page ↗
Status
Analyzed
Published
2026-05-28
Last modified
2026-10-14
Assigner
[email protected]
CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
7.8 HIGH — CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Weaknesses
CWE-276

Description

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.

Affected configurations

• canonical multipass (< 1.16.3)

Related

Weakness · CWE (1)

  • CWE-276 Incorrect Default Permissions weakness

References