Summary
Lima: An arbitrary user in a QEMU VM could gain the root privilege in the VM via the guest agent socket
Advisory details
Impact
On an instance of Lima running with qemu driver, an arbitrary user in the VM could access /run/lima-guestagent.sock when the guest agent is enabled.
This could result in running an arbitrary command with the root privileges in the VM (not on the host), as lima-guestagent.sock provides the tunneling service for an arbitrary address, including a Unix socket address for privileged daemons like D-Bus.
This vulnerability is not exploitable on vz driver, as the guest agent uses vsocks instead of Unix sockets.
Patches
Patched in Lima v2.1.3 (8a45892378d22f40505c31a38f786a07701b6d50)
[!NOTE] The default user account in the VM can still run an arbitrary command as the root via the guest agent socket. This is not a vulnerability, as the user can already run an arbitrary command with
sudoby design.
Workarounds
- On macOS hosts, use
vzdriver instead ofqemu(limactl create --vm-type=vz. Default since v1.0.) - Or, disable the guest agent (
limactl create --plain)
References
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-2j9v-p4xj-cjw2
- https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/security/advisories/GHSA-2j9v-p4xj-cjw2
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-53657
- https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/commit/8a45892378d22f40505c31a38f786a07701b6d50
- https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/commit/b08cae8a670cf916d5da11c48a6de76dabd89678
- https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/releases/tag/v2.1.3
Related vulnerabilities
All Supply chain →- CRITICALCVE-2026-73843
OpenChoreo: Unauthenticated access to data-plane operations via OpenChoreo cluster-gateway management APIs
- MEDIUMGHSA-596p-6jv8-775v
Craft CMS: Authenticated leak of secret environment variables
- MEDIUMCVE-2026-70606
Electron: ProtocolResponse.url reuses the default session cache instead of the registering session
- HIGHCVE-2026-67427
Flyto2 Core: ${env.VAR} interpolation reads any env secret despite env.get being denylisted
- HIGHCVE-2026-54727
proot-distro has a Container Isolation Bypass via Crafted Restore Archive
- HIGHCVE-2026-54504
@andrea9293/mcp-documentation-server: Web UI API binds to all interfaces without authentication by default