Overview
A critical race condition vulnerability, CVE-2025-43275, has been identified in multiple versions of macOS, including Sequoia 15.6, Sonoma 14.7.7, and Ventura 13.7.7. This susceptibility could potentially allow an application to break out of its sandbox, leading to a system compromise or data leakage. The vulnerability is of significant concern due to its high severity score, indicating a potential for extensive damage if successfully exploited.
The broad user base of macOS elevates the importance of this vulnerability, making millions of devices worldwide potentially susceptible. This vulnerability’s potential to escape from the sandboxing mechanism that confines applications to their dedicated memory space could lead to unauthorized access and control over others’ software and data.
Vulnerability Summary
CVE ID: CVE-2025-43275
Severity: Critical (9.8)
Attack Vector: Local
Privileges Required: None
User Interaction: Required
Impact: System compromise and potential data leakage
Affected Products
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Product | Affected Versions
macOS Sequoia | 15.6
macOS Sonoma | 14.7.7
macOS Ventura | 13.7.7
How the Exploit Works
The vulnerability stems from a race condition in the way macOS handles certain application processes. A race condition occurs when the system’s behavior is dependent on the sequence or timing of events and the system doesn’t handle the sequence correctly. In this case, a malicious application could exploit the race condition to break out of its sandbox, gaining unauthorized access to system resources or data that it would typically be restricted from accessing.
Conceptual Example Code
Here’s a conceptual example of how the vulnerability might be exploited. In this scenario, a malicious application is running on a vulnerable macOS system. It might manipulate timing or sequence of events to exploit the race condition:
# This is a conceptual example and not actual exploit code
malicious_app --exploit-race-condition --gain-unauthorized-access
The command above symbolizes the malicious app exploiting the race condition to escalate its privileges and gain unauthorized access to system resources.
However, it’s important to note that actual exploitation would be more complex and require detailed knowledge of macOS internals and the specific conditions required to trigger the race condition.