Lima: An arbitrary user in a QEMU VM could gain the root privilege in the VM via the guest agent socket

### 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 `sudo` by design. ### Workarounds - On macOS hosts, use `vz` driver instead of `qemu` (`limactl create --vm-type=vz`. Default since v1.0.) - Or, disable the guest agent (`limactl create --plain`)

Source published

14 Aug 2026 19:24:33 UTC

Source modified

18 Aug 2026 15:10:49 UTC

Observed here

24 Oct 2026 13:19:41 UTC

Source terms

GitHub Advisory Database · CC-BY-4.0

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CVSS_V3 · CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Publisher rating · HIGH