The vulnerability resides in Kata Containers’ CopyFile policy implementation, which unintentionally allows a host to write to arbitrary paths within a guest workload image. By exploiting this oversight, an attacker can overwrite binaries inside the virtual machine and potentially exfiltrate data from containers. The exposed weakness is a classic path traversal flaw (CWE‑61) that compromises the integrity of guest file systems. Based on the description it is inferred that an attacker would need to gain or influence host access to perform the overwrite, and the impact could elevate privileges within the container ecosystem.

Affected deployments are those running Kata Containers v3.4.0 through v3.28.0 on any host platform. The oversight exists in the CopyFile policy and handler used by these versions, and the issue is addressed in v3.29.0. Any environment that uses older versions of Kata Containers is therefore at risk.

The flaw carries a CVSS score of 8.2, indicating high severity. The EPSS score is below 1%, signifying a low but non‑zero likelihood of exploitation. It is not listed in CISA’s KEV catalog. Based on the description it is inferred that the exploit path requires an attacker to control or influence the Kata Containers host, which can then write arbitrary files into the guest. This makes the attack vector local to the host environment, but the impact is remote code execution inside the virtual machine.