High severity · published Jan 22, 2026
CVE-2026-23953
Incus container environment configuration newline injection
8.7
CVSS
0.5%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
Incus is a system container and virtual machine manager. In versions 6.20.0 and below, a user with the ability to launch a container with a custom YAML configuration (e.g a member of the ‘incus’ group) can create an environment variable containing newlines, which can be used to add additional configuration items in the container’s lxc.conf due to newline injection. This can allow adding arbitrary lifecycle hooks, ultimately resulting in arbitrary command execution on the host. Exploiting this issue on IncusOS requires a slight modification of the payload to change to a different writable directory for the validation step (e.g /tmp). This can be confirmed with a second container with /tmp mounted from the host (A privileged action for validation only). A fix is planned for versions 6.0.6 and 6.21.0, but they have not been released at the time of publication.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N
Attack vector
Adjacent
Complexity
Low
Privileges
Low
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
High
Availability
None
Scope
Changed
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.5% · higher than 42% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
IN
incus · lxc
>= 6.1.0, <= 6.20.0; <= 6.0.5 · source: vendor, NVD
Affected product
IN
incus
lxc
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