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CVE-2020-9839 is a privilege escalation vulnerability affecting multiple Apple operating systems, including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. The vulnerability is due to a race condition in state handling, which could allow a local application to gain elevated privileges. The issue was addressed by Apple with improved state management in the affected OS versions.
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1 valid exploit after Mallory filtered fakes, detection scripts, and README-only repos.
This repository contains a single Metasploit module (modules/exploits/osx/local/cfprefsd_race_condition.rb) that exploits CVE-2020-9839, a local privilege escalation vulnerability in macOS versions 10.15 to 10.15.4. The exploit leverages a race condition in the cfprefsd daemon to perform an arbitrary file write as root. By overwriting /etc/pam.d/login with permissive PAM configuration, the attacker can log in as root without a password. The module uploads a payload (default: osx/x64/meterpreter/reverse_tcp) and an exploit binary to a writable directory (default: /tmp), executes the exploit to overwrite the PAM file, and then triggers a root login to execute the payload. After exploitation, the module attempts to restore the original /etc/pam.d/login file. The exploit is operational and provides a root shell or arbitrary code execution as root. The only fingerprintable endpoints are the /etc/pam.d/login file and the writable directory used for payload staging.
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