Vulnerability · Published Dec 3, 2025 · Assigned by mitre
CVE-2025-65842
Medium 5.1
In plain English
A medium-severity security flaw in the affected software. Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.2% (higher than 8% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
The Aquarius HelperTool (1.0.003) privileged XPC service on macOS contains multiple flaws that allow local privilege escalation. The service accepts XPC connections from any local process without validating the client's identity, and its authorization logic incorrectly calls AuthorizationCopyRights with a NULL reference, causing all authorization checks to succeed. The executeCommand:authorization:withReply: method then interpolates attacker-controlled input into NSTask and executes it with root privileges. A local attacker can exploit these weaknesses to run arbitrary commands as root, create persistent backdoors, or obtain a fully interactive root shell.
Affected products (as reported)
Weakness: CWE-266 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N