Incus vulnerable to arbitrary file read and write through pongo templates (lxc incus)

CVE-2026-33897
CRITICAL 10.0

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. Prior to version 6.23.0, instance template files can be used to cause arbitrary read or writes as root on the host server. Incus allows for pongo2 templates within instances which can be used at various times in the instance lifecycle to template files inside of the instance. This particular implementation of pongo2 within Incus allowed for file read/write but with the expectation that the pongo2 chroot feature would isolate all such access to the instance's filesystem. This was allowed such that a template could theoretically read a file and then generate a new version of said file. Unfortunately the chroot isolation mechanism is entirely skipped by pongo2 leading to easy access to the entire system's filesystem with root privileges. Version 6.23.0 patches the issue.

Weaknesses (CWE)

  • CWE-1336 — Improper Neutralization of Special Elements Used in a Template Engine

References

Scores

VersionScoreVectorScored by
CVSS 3.1CRITICAL 10.0CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:HGitHub_M
CVSS 3.1CRITICAL 9.9CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:HNVD · security-advisories@github.com (Secondary)

Advisories

European references

Affected configurations (NVD CPE)

Affected products

ProductVersions
lxc · incusaffected < 6.23.0

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