GitHub Advisoryadvisory · Go
GHSA-3g2j-vm47-x4mj LXD vulnerable to a local privilege escalation through custom storage volumes
HIGH
Official page ↗
- Ecosystem
- Go
- Packages
- github.com/canonical/lxd
- Severity
- High
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
- Weaknesses
- CWE-269
- Reviewed
- 2025-11-13
Affected packages
• Go github.com/canonical/lxd: < 0.0.0-20251110144034-698854d0164f → fixed in 0.0.0-20251110144034-698854d0164f
Description
Impact
This affects any LXD user in an environment where an unprivileged user may have root access to a container with an attached custom storage volume that has the `security.shifted` property set to `true` as well as access to the host as an unprivileged user.
The most common case for this would be systems using `lxd-user` with the less privileged lxd group to provide unprivileged users with an isolated restricted access to LXD. Such users may be able to create a custom storage volume with the necessary property (depending on kernel and filesystem support) and can then write a setuid binary from within the container which can be executed as an unprivileged user on the host to gain root privileges.
Patches
Patches for this issue are available:
• LXD 6 series: https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/16904
• LXD 5.21 LTS series: https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/16922
• LXD 5.0 LTS series: https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/16923
• LXD 4.0 LTS series: https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/16924
The first commit changes the permissions for any new storage pool, the later commit adds a patch that applies it on startup to all existing storage pools.
These fixes are also available in the associated candidate snap channels for each LTS series:
• 5.21/candidate (5.21.4-8a3cf61)
• 5.0/candidate (5.0.5-5c60378)
• 4.0/candidate (4.0.10-35a8127)
We will be preparing intermediate releases to the associated stable snap channels shortly.
Workarounds
Permissions can be manually restricted until a patched version of LXD is deployed.
This is done with:
```
sudo nsenter --mount=/run/snapd/ns/lxd.mnt -- chmod 0700 /var/snap/lxd/common/lxd/storage-pools/*/{custom*,virtual-machines*,images}
sudo nsenter --mount=/run/snapd/ns/lxd.mnt -- chmod 0711 /var/snap/lxd/common/lxd/storage-pools/*/{containers*,buckets*}
```
Those are the same permissions which will be applied by the patched LXD for both new and existing storage pools.
References
This was reported to Incus publicly on Github here:
• https://github.com/lxc/incus/security/advisories/GHSA-56mx-8g9f-5crf
• https://github.com/lxc/incus/issues/2641
Related
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-269 Improper Privilege Management weakness
References
- https://github.com/canonical/lxd/security/advisories/GHSA-3g2j-vm47-x4mj web
- https://github.com/lxc/incus/security/advisories/GHSA-56mx-8g9f-5crf web
- https://github.com/lxc/incus/issues/2641 web
- https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/16904 web
- https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/16922 web
- https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/16923 web
- https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/16924 web
- https://github.com/canonical/lxd package