Canonical Multipass up to 1.16.2 on macOS /Library/Application default permission

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability was found in Canonical Multipass up to 1.16.2 on macOS. It has been declared as critical. This affects an unknown part in the library /Library/Application. Such manipulation leads to default permission. This vulnerability is traded as CVE-2026-49237. An attack has to be approached locally. There is no exploit available. It is recommended to upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Canonical Multipass up to 1.16.2 on macOS and classified as critical. Affected by this issue is some unknown processing in the library /Library/Application. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a default permission vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-276. During installation, installed file permissions are set to allow anyone to modify those files. Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. CVE summarizes:

An issue was discovered in Canonical Multipass for macOS before version 1.16.3 due to an incomplete fix for CVE-2025-5199. While the patch in version 1.16.0 updated the ownership of the multipassd daemon binary to root:wheel, five co-located binaries (multipass, qemu-img, qemu-system-aarch64, qemu-system-x86_64, and sshfs_server) in /Library/Application Support/com.canonical.multipass/bin/ retain ownership by the installing user and remain writable. Because the root LaunchDaemon (com.canonical.multipassd.plist) configures a PATH environment variable that prioritizes this user-writable directory and invokes these auxiliary binaries by their bare names, a local attacker can replace an auxiliary binary (such as qemu-img) with a malicious wrapper. When the root daemon subsequently triggers the binary during routine execution (e.g., via multipass launch), the malicious code executes with root privileges, leading to local privilege escalation.

The advisory is shared for download at github.com. This vulnerability is handled as CVE-2026-49237 since 05/28/2026. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack needs to be approached locally. There are known technical details, but no exploit is available. The MITRE ATT&CK project declares the attack technique as T1222.

Upgrading to version 1.16.3 eliminates this vulnerability.

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Productinfo

Vendor

• Canonical

Name

• Multipass

Version

• 1.16.0
• 1.16.1
• 1.16.2

License

• open-source

Website

• Product: https://github.com/canonical/multipass/

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