Description

CERT Polska has received a report about vulnerabilities in Sparkle software and participated in coordination of their disclosure.

The vulnerability CVE-2025-10015: The Sparkle framework includes an XPC service Downloader.xpc, by default this service is private to the application its bundled with. A local unprivileged attacker can register this XPC service globally which will inherit TCC permissions of the application. Lack of validation of connecting client allows the attacker to copy TCC-protected files to an arbitrary location. Access to other resources beyond granted-permissions requires user interaction with a system prompt asking for permission.

The vulnerability CVE-2025-10016: The Sparkle framework includes a helper tool Autoupdate. Due to lack of authentication of connecting clients a local unprivileged attacker can request installation of crafted malicious PKG file by racing to connect to the daemon when other app spawns it as root. This results in local privilege escalation to root privileges. It is worth noting that it is possible to spawn Autopudate manually via Installer XPC service. However this requires the victim to enter credentials upon system authorization dialog creation that can be modified by the attacker.

Both issues were fixed in version 2.7.2

Credits

We thank Karol Mazurek - Afine Team for the responsible vulnerability report.