CleanMyMac X software spotted with several privilege escalation vulnerabilities

Recently, a lot of privilege escalation vulnerabilities in MacPaw’s CleanMyMac X software.

The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to gain local access to victims’ systems and modify the file system as root. MacPaw’s CleanMyMac X software frees up the disk space on users’ machines by scanning for unused and unnecessary files and deleting them.

Recently, a team of researchers found out several privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the software which could allow attackers to gain local access to victims’ machines. The attackers could then modify the file system as root.

Researchers from Cisco Talos detected 13 privilege escalation vulnerabilities in CleanMyMac X software. Talos has tested and confirmed that Clean My Mac X, version 4.04 is affected by all of these vulnerabilities.

Delete files from the root file system

One of the privilege escalation vulnerability arises in the ‘moveItemAtPath’ function of the helper protocol as CleanMyMac X software improperly validates the inputs. This vulnerability could allow non-root users to delete files from the root file system.

Similar vulnerabilities that arise in ‘moveToTrashItemAtPath’, ‘removeItemAtPath’, ‘truncateFileAtPath’, and ‘removeKextAtPath’ of the helper could allow non-root users to cross privilege boundary and delete files from the root file system.