Incus container environment configuration newline injection (lxc incus)

CVE-2026-23953
HIGH 8.7

At a glance

Source
NVD
EPSS
EPSS 0.49 % · percentile 42 ()
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
GitHub_M
NVD status
Analyzed

Description

Incus is a system container and virtual machine manager. In versions 6.20.0 and below, a user with the ability to launch a container with a custom YAML configuration (e.g a member of the ‘incus’ group) can create an environment variable containing newlines, which can be used to add additional configuration items in the container’s lxc.conf due to newline injection. This can allow adding arbitrary lifecycle hooks, ultimately resulting in arbitrary command execution on the host. Exploiting this issue on IncusOS requires a slight modification of the payload to change to a different writable directory for the validation step (e.g /tmp). This can be confirmed with a second container with /tmp mounted from the host (A privileged action for validation only). A fix is planned for versions 6.0.6 and 6.21.0, but they have not been released at the time of publication.

Weaknesses (CWE)

  • CWE-93 — Improper Neutralization of CRLF Sequences

References

Scores

VersionScoreVectorScored by
CVSS 3.1HIGH 8.7CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:NGitHub_M
CVSS 3.1HIGH 8.7CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:NNVD · security-advisories@github.com (Secondary)

Advisories

European references

Affected configurations (NVD CPE)

Affected products

ProductVersions
lxc · incusaffected >= 6.1.0, <= 6.20.0 ; affected <= 6.0.5

Sources

SourceLicence
CVE List (CVEProject cvelistV5)CVE Program Terms of Use
EPSS (FIRST.org)FIRST — attribution requested
ENISA EUVDENISA — reproduction authorised, source acknowledged
NVD (NIST) via fkie-cad/nvd-json-data-feedsPublic domain — this product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD