VAR-200303-0072
Vulnerability from variot - Updated: 2025-04-03 22:25TruBlueEnvironment for MacOS 10.2.3 and earlier allows local users to overwrite or create arbitrary files and gain root privileges by setting a certain environment variable that is used to write debugging information. There is a vulnerability in the Apple MacOS Classic emulator for MacOS X that may lead to elevation of privileges. This issue exists in TruBlueEnvironment, which is included in the emulator. The environment variable is used to define a location to output debugging information to a file. Exploitation of this issue may enable a malicious local user to gain elevated privileges by causing malicious files to be run through a facility such as cron. Overwriting critical system files may also cause a denial of service. TruBlueEnvironment is a tool included with the MacOS Classic Emulator, installed as setuid root by default. There is a problem with setting environment variables in TruBlueEnvironment. Local attackers can use this vulnerability to perform privilege escalation attacks through cron tools, or overwrite important system files to perform denial-of-service attacks. If the file exists, it will be set to zero bytes. If the file does not exist, it will be created with the umask permission of the calling process. Although the attacker cannot create a file with execution permission, the file created in this way can be read and written globally. In MacOS X, this vulnerability can be used to automatically create files through cron. By default, cron uses the periodic command for daily maintenance. This command will receive several files and pass them to the SHELL parser to run. Since these scripts are run with root user privileges running, so possibly privilege escalation by running cron and TruBluEnvironment
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Sightings
| Author | Source | Type | Date | Other |
|---|
Nomenclature
- Seen: The vulnerability was mentioned, discussed, or observed by the user.
- Confirmed: The vulnerability has been validated from an analyst's perspective.
- Published Proof of Concept: A public proof of concept is available for this vulnerability.
- Exploited: The vulnerability was observed as exploited by the user who reported the sighting.
- Patched: The vulnerability was observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.
- Not exploited: The vulnerability was not observed as exploited by the user who reported the sighting.
- Not confirmed: The user expressed doubt about the validity of the vulnerability.
- Not patched: The vulnerability was not observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.
Vulnerability timeline
Sightings and recorded dates, grouped by day · UTC
How durations are calculated
Following the VTEM framework (Black Hat USA 2015), time to patch starts when the vendor or a coordinator was informed, total time to patch at discovery, and disclosure to patch at public disclosure; vendor response time runs from the report to its acknowledgement. Time to exploit and time unpatched start at the earliest discovery or report, falling back to public disclosure. Unpatched time ends at the first recorded patch, or the calculation time when no patch is recorded. Exploitation to patch shows the interval between those two events; a published proof of concept is a public exploit, not exploitation.
Each result shows its source dates. A negative interval means the end event came first; when date-only inputs leave the order open, the result says so. Date-only inputs are approximate. The earliest evidence wins: KEV report dates and sightings are labelled as such. Records describing another vulnerability are listed but never calculated from, and a PoC alone does not establish exploitation. Missing patch evidence does not prove that no patch exists. Filters below change the event list only.
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The approach is described in our paper Mapping CVEs to MITRE ATT&CK Techniques: A Curated Gold-Set Classifier and the Limits of LLM-Assisted Label Expansion.
Browse all ATT&CK techniques and the vulnerabilities related to each.
Related by attack behaviour
Vulnerabilities whose description is nearest to this one in the vector space of the CIRCL/vulnerability-attack-technique-biencoder model. This is a similarity search over the bi-encoder space (plain cosine), not a classification, and it has no measured accuracy.