Vulnerability · Published Dec 12, 2023 · Assigned by mitre
CVE-2020-12612
High 7.8
In plain English
A high-severity security flaw in the affected software. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.3% (higher than 17% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
An issue was discovered in BeyondTrust Privilege Management for Windows through 5.6. When specifying a program to elevate, it can typically be found within the Program Files (x86) folder and therefore uses the %ProgramFiles(x86)% environment variable. However, when this same policy gets pushed to a 32bit machine, this environment variable does not exist. Therefore, since the standard user can create a user level environment variable, they can repoint this variable to any folder the user has full control of. Then, the folder structure can be created in such a way that a rule matches and arbitrary code runs elevated.