CVE-2025-47972: Race Condition Vulnerability in Microsoft IME Leading to Privilege Escalation

Overview

The cybersecurity landscape is continually evolving with sophisticated threats, highlighting the need for organizations to maintain the highest level of vigilance. A recent discovery, CVE-2025-47972, is a glaring example of such a threat. This security vulnerability affects the Microsoft Input Method Editor (IME) and is categorized as a race condition vulnerability. In essence, it allows an authorized attacker to exploit a concurrent execution flaw using a shared resource without proper synchronization.
This vulnerability is of significant concern as it could lead to privilege escalation over a network. It means an attacker can gain elevated access to resources that are usually restricted to users, thus posing a potential system compromise or data leakage. As such, it’s crucial for all users of the affected product to understand the severity and scope of this vulnerability, and more importantly, the necessary steps to mitigate it.

Vulnerability Summary

CVE ID: CVE-2025-47972
Severity: High (CVSS: 8.0)
Attack Vector: Network
Privileges Required: Low
User Interaction: Required
Impact: Potential system compromise, data leakage

Affected Products

Product | Affected Versions

Microsoft Input Method Editor (IME) | All versions prior to the latest patch

How the Exploit Works

The exploit takes advantage of a race condition in Microsoft IME. A race condition arises when two or more operations must execute in sequence, but the program’s flow of execution gets disrupted, causing them to execute concurrently. In this case, the flaw allows an attacker to manipulate the process sequence and interact with a shared resource improperly synchronized. By doing so, an attacker can elevate their privileges over a network, leading to potential system compromise or data leakage.

Conceptual Example Code

Here is a conceptual example of how the vulnerability might be exploited:

# Attacker gains low-level authorization
$ ssh user@target.com
# Attacker starts two processes concurrently
$ ./vulnerable_process & ./malicious_process

In this example, the attacker initiates two processes concurrently. The `vulnerable_process` is a legitimate operation on the system that has the race condition vulnerability. At the same time, the `malicious_process` is designed to exploit this vulnerability. Since these processes are not correctly synchronized, they cause a race condition, leading to privilege escalation.

Mitigation

For mitigation, users are advised to apply vendor patches as soon as they become available. Microsoft has already acknowledged the vulnerability and is expected to release patches to fix it. Until then, users can use Web Application Firewalls (WAF) or Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) as temporary mitigation to monitor network traffic and prevent unauthorized access.