Last week Microsoft released new versions of WSL2 for a yet-to-be-public security vulnerability affecting their Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 implementation. Those details around CVE-2025-53788 are now public for this vulnerability that could lead to elevation of privileges.
CVE-2025-53788 was made public yesterday as part of the monthly Patch Tuesday dance. CVE-2025-53788 comes down to being a time-of-check time-of-use “TOCTOU” race condition within the WSL2 kernel code.
This race condition could lead to elevation of local privileges for WSL2 usage prior to last week’s WSL 2.5.10 and WSL 2.6.1 releases. The good news though is this only affects local users of WSL2 and isn’t any remote vector involved. Hopefully you aren’t dealing with any multi-user WSL2 usage anyhow or relying on Windows Subsystem for Linux for running any production workloads with privileged information, but nevertheless Microsoft found it serious enough to patch against CVE-2025-53788 in advance.
Additional CVE-2025-53788 details are available via msrc.microsoft.com.
