A vulnerability in the London Trust Media Private Internet Access (PIA) VPN Client v82 for macOS could allow an authenticated, local attacker to run arbitrary code with elevated privileges. The openvpn_launcher binary is setuid root. This program is called during the connection process and executes several operating system utilities to configure the system. The networksetup utility is called using relative paths. A local unprivileged user can execute arbitrary commands as root by creating a networksetup trojan which will be executed during the connection process. This is possible because the PATH environment variable is not reset prior to executing the OS utility.

References

• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-12576
• https://github.com/mirchr/security-research/blob/master/vulnerabilities/PIA/CVE-2019-12576.txt