CVE-2026-49237

7.8 HIGH

An issue was discovered in Canonical Multipass for macOS before version 1.16.3 due to an incomplete fix for CVE-2025-5199

Published: 2026-05-28 · Last updated: 2026-06-01

Severity and scoring

CVSS: 7.8 HIGH
Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CWE: CWE-276

Affected products

Vendor	Product
canonical	multipass

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.

Source: NVD

References

[NVD]https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-49237
[Exploit reference]https://github.com/canonical/multipass/security/advisories/GHSA-r2xg-x32f-23c5

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