This vulnerability (CVE-2026-53657) involves incorrect default permissions on the lima-guestagent.sock Unix socket when running lima with the qemu driver and the guest agent enabled. An arbitrary user in the VM can access this socket to tunnel commands to privileged daemons, enabling execution of arbitrary commands with root privileges inside the VM. The vulnerability does not affect the vz driver because it uses vsocks instead of Unix sockets. The issue is fixed in lima version 2.1.3. The vendor notes that the default user can already execute commands as root via sudo, so this access is not considered a security flaw in that context.

An attacker with arbitrary user access inside the VM can execute commands with root privileges within the VM environment by accessing the guest agent socket. This does not affect the host system. The vulnerability is limited to the qemu driver configuration with the guest agent enabled. There are no known exploits in the wild. The impact is high within the VM context but does not extend to host compromise.

A patch is available in lima version 2.1.3 that addresses this vulnerability. Users should upgrade to version 2.1.3 or later. Alternatively, on macOS hosts, users can switch to the vz driver (default since v1.0) using 'limactl create --vm-type=vz', which is not affected. Another workaround is to disable the guest agent by creating the VM with 'limactl create --plain'. The vendor notes that the default user can already run commands as root via sudo, so this behavior is by design and not a vulnerability.