CVE intelligence

CVE-2026-50540

Vulnerability intelligence

Published Aug 7, 2026Sources checked Sep 12, 2026

9.6CRITICALCVSS out of 10

What this means

Review the available evidence

CVE-2026-50540 and is rated Critical severity with a CVSS score of 9.6. It is not in the current CISA KEV record we collected. That does not prove exploitation has not occurred.

CISA KEVNot listedBased on the latest collected catalog

EPSS0.4%Estimated 30-day exploitation probability

Ransomware useNot markedCISA KEV ransomware field

Threat actors0Source-linked actor relationships

Overview

What is CVE-2026-50540?

Kata Containers is an open source project focusing on a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that perform like containers. Prior to version 4.0.0, kata-runtime is vulnerable to host code execution via an unvalidated configuration path annotation. The runtime accepts an arbitrary io.katacontainers.config_path pod annotation and loads the referenced host TOML file without restriction. As a result, a pod user who can place a file at a host-visible path can supply a configuration that selects an attacker-controlled hypervisor or virtio-fs daemon binary, executing code as root on the host. This issue is fixed in version 4.0.0.