Vulnerabilities > CVE-2018-7484 - Untrusted Search Path vulnerability in Purevpn 5.19.4.0
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
MEDIUM Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
COMPLETE Integrity impact
COMPLETE Availability impact
COMPLETE Summary
An issue was discovered in PureVPN through 5.19.4.0 on Windows. The client installation grants the Everyone group Full Control permission to the installation directory. In addition, the PureVPNService.exe service, which runs under NT Authority\SYSTEM privileges, tries to load several dynamic-link libraries using relative paths instead of the absolute path. When not using a fully qualified path, the application will first try to load the library from the directory from which the application is started. As the residing directory of PureVPNService.exe is writable to all users, this makes the application susceptible to privilege escalation through DLL hijacking.
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Application | 1 |
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Leveraging/Manipulating Configuration File Search Paths This attack loads a malicious resource into a program's standard path used to bootstrap and/or provide contextual information for a program like a path variable or classpath. J2EE applications and other component based applications that are built from multiple binaries can have very long list of dependencies to execute. If one of these libraries and/or references is controllable by the attacker then application controls can be circumvented by the attacker. A standard UNIX path looks similar to this If the attacker modifies the path variable to point to a locale that includes malicious resources then the user unwittingly can execute commands on the attackers' behalf: This is a form of usurping control of the program and the attack can be done on the classpath, database resources, or any other resources built from compound parts. At runtime detection and blocking of this attack is nearly impossible, because the configuration allows execution.