CVE-2019-17190

A Local Privilege Escalation issue was discovered in Avast Secure Browser 76.0.1659.101

published January 27, 2020

CVSS
—
EPSS
1%
Percentile
43.5
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

A Local Privilege Escalation issue was discovered in Avast Secure Browser 76.0.1659.101. The vulnerability is due to an insecure ACL set by the AvastBrowserUpdate.exe (which is running as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM) when AvastSecureBrowser.exe checks for new updates. When the update check is triggered, the elevated process cleans the ACL of the Update.ini file in %PROGRAMDATA%\Avast Software\Browser\Update\ and sets all privileges to group Everyone. Because any low-privileged user can create, delete, or modify the Update.ini file stored in this location, an attacker with low privileges can create a hard link named Update.ini in this folder, and make it point to a file writable by NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM. Once AvastBrowserUpdate.exe is triggered by the update check functionality, the DACL is set to a misconfigured value on the crafted Update.ini and, consequently, to the target file that was previously not writable by the low-privileged attacker.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS
Not scored
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00522 · 43.5th percentile
Published
2020-01-27T15:23Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 27 JAN 15:23Z
    A Local Privilege Escalation issue was discovered in Avast Secure Browser 76.0.1659.101
    cvelistv5