CVE-2025-43199
Published: 30 July 2025
Summary
CVE-2025-43199 is a critical-severity Improper Privilege Management (CWE-269) vulnerability in Apple Macos. Its CVSS base score is 9.8 (Critical).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Exploitation for Privilege Escalation (T1068); ranked at the 29.4th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified are NIST 800-53 AC-3 (Access Enforcement) and AC-6 (Least Privilege).
Threat & Defense at a Glance
Threat & Defense Details
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5)AI
Timely flaw remediation through patching directly prevents exploitation of the permissions issue allowing malicious apps to gain root privileges, as addressed by Apple's code removal in updated macOS versions.
Enforcing least privilege counters CWE-269 improper privilege management, restricting malicious apps from escalating to root access.
Access enforcement ensures approved authorizations are applied, directly mitigating the permissions flaw exploited for root privilege escalation.
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Direct local privilege escalation to root via improper privilege management (CWE-269) in a malicious app matches Exploitation for Privilege Escalation.
NVD Description
A permissions issue was addressed by removing the vulnerable code. This issue is fixed in macOS Sequoia 15.6, macOS Sonoma 14.7.7, macOS Ventura 13.7.7. A malicious app may be able to gain root privileges.
Deeper analysisAI
CVE-2025-43199 is a permissions issue, classified under CWE-269 (Improper Privilege Management), affecting macOS systems prior to the specified patched versions. The vulnerability was addressed by Apple through the removal of vulnerable code and is fixed in macOS Sequoia 15.6, macOS Sonoma 14.7.7, and macOS Ventura 13.7.7. Published on July 30, 2025, it carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 9.8 (Critical), reflecting its high severity due to network accessibility, low attack complexity, and no requirements for privileges or user interaction.
The vulnerability enables a malicious app to escalate privileges to root level, potentially compromising the entire system. Exploitation is feasible over a network (AV:N) by unauthenticated attackers (PR:N) without user involvement (UI:N), leading to high impacts on confidentiality, integrity, and availability (C:H/I:H/A:H) within the unaffected security scope (S:U).
Apple's security advisories, detailed in support documents such as https://support.apple.com/en-us/124149, https://support.apple.com/en-us/124150, and https://support.apple.com/en-us/124151, confirm the fix via code removal in the listed macOS updates. Additional disclosures appear on seclists.org at http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2025/Jul/32 and http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2025/Jul/33. Practitioners should prioritize patching affected systems to mitigate the root privilege escalation risk.
Details
- CWE(s)