Vulnerabilities > CVE-2019-12576 - Untrusted Search Path vulnerability in Londontrustmedia Private Internet Access VPN Client 82
Attack vector
LOCAL Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
LOW Confidentiality impact
HIGH Integrity impact
HIGH Availability impact
HIGH Summary
A vulnerability in the London Trust Media Private Internet Access (PIA) VPN Client v82 for macOS could allow an authenticated, local attacker to run arbitrary code with elevated privileges. The openvpn_launcher binary is setuid root. This program is called during the connection process and executes several operating system utilities to configure the system. The networksetup utility is called using relative paths. A local unprivileged user can execute arbitrary commands as root by creating a networksetup trojan which will be executed during the connection process. This is possible because the PATH environment variable is not reset prior to executing the OS utility.
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Application | 1 | |
| OS | 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.