CVE-2020-13162 vulnerability in Pulse Secure Products
Published on June 16, 2020
A time-of-check time-of-use vulnerability in PulseSecureService.exe in Pulse Secure Client versions prior to 9.1.6 down to 5.3 R70 for Windows (which runs as NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM) allows unprivileged users to run a Microsoft Installer executable with elevated privileges.
Vulnerability Analysis
CVE-2020-13162 is exploitable with local system access, and requires small amount of user privileges. This vulnerability is consided to have a high level of attack complexity. Public availability of a proof of concept (POC) exploit exists for CVE-2020-13162. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to be very high.
Weakness Type
What is a TOCTTOU Vulnerability?
The software checks the state of a resource before using that resource, but the resource's state can change between the check and the use in a way that invalidates the results of the check. This can cause the software to perform invalid actions when the resource is in an unexpected state. This weakness can be security-relevant when an attacker can influence the state of the resource between check and use. This can happen with shared resources such as files, memory, or even variables in multithreaded programs.
CVE-2020-13162 has been classified to as a TOCTTOU vulnerability or weakness.
Products Associated with CVE-2020-13162
stack.watch emails you whenever new vulnerabilities are published in Pulse Secure Desktop Client or Pulse Secure Installer Service. Just hit a watch button to start following.
Exploit Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) scores estimate the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days. The percentile shows you how this score compares to all other vulnerabilities.