Trend Micro on Thursday disclosed the details of a recently patched privilege escalation vulnerability that has been found to impact macOS, iOS and iPadOS.
The flaw, tracked as CVE-2021-30724, was discovered by Trend Micro researcher Mickey Jin, and it was patched by Apple on May 24 with the release of macOS 11.4, iOS 14.6 and iPadOS 14.6.
The vulnerability, caused by an out-of-bounds memory access issue, can allow a local attacker to elevate privileges by sending specially crafted requests. Apple said the flaw was patched with “improved checks.”
In addition to technical details, Trend Micro released the source code of a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit.
The vulnerability is related to Core Virtual Machine Server (CVMServer), an XPC service and system daemon that runs with root privileges to handle XPC requests. XPC is designed for low-level communications between processes, with client processes sending XPC requests to the server through a dedicated API.
The flaw exists in the XPC request message handler and an attacker can trigger it using specially crafted requests.
“The vulnerability is moderately difficult to trigger, but not impossible,” Jin explained. “If CVE-2021-30724 is left unpatched, an attacker can elevate his privileges by exploiting the vulnerability.”
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