Vulnerability in Cloud-Hypervisor

CVE-2026-27211

Cloud Hypervisor is a Virtual Machine Monitor for Cloud workloads. Versions 34.0 through 50.0 arevulnerable to arbitrary host file exfiltration (constrained by process privileges) when using virtio-block devices backed by raw images. A malicious guest can overwrite its disk header with a crafted QCOW2 structure pointing to a sensitive host path. Upon the next VM boot or disk scan, the image format auto-detection parses this header and serves the host file's contents to the guest. Guest-initiated VM reboots are sufficient to trigger a disk scan and do not cause the Cloud Hypervisor process to exit. Therefore, a single VM can perform this attack without needing interaction from the management stack. Successful exploitation requires the backing image to be either writable by the guest or sourced from an untrusted origin. Deployments utilizing only trusted, read-only images are not affected. This issue has been fixed in version 50.1. To workaround, enable land lock sandboxing and restrict process privileges and access.

EPSS: 0.005 (39.9th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 10.0 (Critical). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N.

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-27211?
CVE-2026-27211 is a critical-severity vulnerability in Cloud-Hypervisor, classified under External Control of File Name or Path. CVSS score: 10.0/10. Published 2026-02-21.
How severe is CVE-2026-27211?
Critical severity. CVSS v3 base score is 10.0 out of 10.