Privilege Escalation via UEFI Slim Bootloader Protection Failure
CVE-2025-35968 Published on November 11, 2025

Protection mechanism failure in the UEFI firmware for the Slim Bootloader within firmware may allow an escalation of privilege. Startup code and smm adversary with a privileged user combined with a high complexity attack may enable escalation of privilege. This result may potentially occur via local access when attack requirements are present without special internal knowledge and requires no user interaction. The potential vulnerability may impact the confidentiality (high), integrity (high) and availability (high) of the vulnerable system, resulting in subsequent system confidentiality (none), integrity (none) and availability (none) impacts.

NVD

Vulnerability Analysis

CVE-2025-35968 is exploitable with local system access, and requires user privileges. This vulnerability is consided to have a high level of attack complexity. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to be very high.

Attack Vector:
LOCAL
Attack Complexity:
HIGH
Privileges Required:
HIGH
User Interaction:
NONE
Scope:
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality Impact:
HIGH
Integrity Impact:
HIGH
Availability Impact:
HIGH

Weakness Type

Protection Mechanism Failure

The product does not use or incorrectly uses a protection mechanism that provides sufficient defense against directed attacks against the product. This weakness covers three distinct situations. A "missing" protection mechanism occurs when the application does not define any mechanism against a certain class of attack. An "insufficient" protection mechanism might provide some defenses - for example, against the most common attacks - but it does not protect against everything that is intended. Finally, an "ignored" mechanism occurs when a mechanism is available and in active use within the product, but the developer has not applied it in some code path.


Exploit Probability

EPSS
0.03%
Percentile
8.66%

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.