CVE-2018-7716

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    CVE-2018-7716

    Published: 5 Mar 2018Last Modified: 10 Mar 2026

    Summary:

    Details: 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.

    Affected packages

    Package

    Name:

    Purl:

    Affected ranges

    Type: N/A

    Events:

    Introduced- None
    Fixed -None

    Affected versions

    Common Vulnerability Scoring System

    Attack Vector
    Network
    Adjacent
    Local
    Physical
    Privileges Required
    None
    Low
    High
    User Interaction
    None
    Required
    Scope
    Unchanged
    Changed
    Confidentiality
    None
    Low
    High
    Integrity
    None
    Low
    High
    Availability
    None
    Low
    High
    CVE-2018-7716 | CVE-DB