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Fencer Intel
high 7.8

CVE-2026-49237 json

Local Privilege Escalation in Canonical Multipass

published 5mo ago modified 28d ago also EUVD-2026-32900

cvss
7.8
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.1%
EPSS 0.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 3%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • Canonical Multipass 1.16.3

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CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
total
Assessed
5mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.14% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 3% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-11).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/canonical/multipass/security/advisories/GHSA-r2xg-x32f-23c5 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected products

  • Canonical Multipass

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-276 Incorrect Default Permissions

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.