CVE-2018-7716 Information

Description

PrivateVPN 2.0.31 for macOS suffers from a root privilege escalation vulnerability with its com.privat.vpn.helper privileged helper tool. This privileged helper tool implements an XPC service that allows arbitrary installed applications to connect and send messages. The XPC service extracts the config string from the corresponding XPC message. This string is supposed to point to an internal OpenVPN configuration file. If a new connection has not already been established an attacker can send the XPC service a malicious XPC message with the config string pointing at an OpenVPN configuration file that he or she controls. In the configuration file an attacker can specify a dynamic library plugin that should run for every new VPN connection. This plugin will execute code in the context of the root user.

CVSS Vector

CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Reference

https://github.com/VerSprite/research/edit/master/advisories/VS-2018-006.md

Attack Complexity

LOW

Privileges Required

NONE

User Interaction Required

NONE

Scope

NONE

Confidentiality Impact

UNCHANGED

Integrity Impact

HIGH

Availability Impact

HIGH

Base Score

HIGH

Base Severity

9.8