Improper preservation of permissions in the Avast sandbox minifilter driver (aswSnx.sys) on Windows allows a local, low-privileged attacker executing inside the sandbox to escape file isolation and escalate to SYSTEM.
When the sandbox virtualizes a file it copies the original security descriptor, but the driver opened the virtualization target object with GENERIC_WRITE and FILE_WRITE_ATTRIBUTES only, omitting WRITE_DAC. Every attempt to apply the original DACL therefore failed, and the failure was discarded silently, leaving virtualized copies of sensitive files with permissive permissions. Because the IRP_MJ_CREATE callback additionally did not strip WRITE_DAC for sensitive directories, a sandboxed process could rewrite the security descriptor of a virtualized object, read the virtualized copy of the SAM database, extract local NTLM password hashes and execute code as SYSTEM.
The absence of an IRP_MJ_SET_SECURITY callback in the driver's operation registration table is a related defense-in-depth gap, but it is not the control that prevents this attack.
CVSS Details
- CVSS 3.1 Base Score: 8.8
- CVSS 3.1 Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H)
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