Lima Virtual Machine Manager (lima‑vm) hosts Linux guests via QEMU, commonly on macOS hosts. Prior to version 2.1.3, the qemu driver exposed the guest‑agent socket at /run/lima-guestagent.sock to any user within the guest. The socket domain sockets used by core daemons such as D‑Bus. Consequently, an unprivileged user inside the guest can issue commands that are executed as root, effectively providing arbitrary command execution with root privileges inside the VM. The flaw is a case of improper authorization (CWE‑276) and a mis‑configured privileged interface (CWE‑668).

The problem exists in Lima versions earlier than 2.1.3 when the qemu driver is used and the guest agent is enabled. Lima is maintained by the lima‑vm community. Any virtual machine configured in this way before the 2.1.3 release is vulnerable.

The vulnerability has a CVSS score of 8.2 and is considered a high‑severity local privilege escalation. The EPSS score of < 1% indicates a very low but non‑zero likelihood of exploitation, and the vulnerability is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog, meaning no confirmed public exploits are known. The attack vector is likely a local user who can write to the guest file system and interact with the socket, allowing them to trigger the privilege escalation. The required condition is simply that the guest agent socket is accessible.