CVE-2018-10169

Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 2.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2018-04-16 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-732

Description

ProtonVPN 1.3.3 for Windows suffers from a SYSTEM privilege escalation vulnerability through the "ProtonVPN Service" service. This service establishes an NetNamedPipe endpoint that allows arbitrary installed applications to connect and call publicly exposed methods. The "Connect" method accepts a class instance argument that provides attacker control of the OpenVPN command line. An attacker can specify a dynamic library plugin that should run for every new VPN connection. This plugin will execute code in the context of the SYSTEM user.

Affected products

ProtonMail Protonvpn: 1.3.3

References

https://github.com/VerSprite/research/blob/master/advisories/VS-2018-017.md
https://github.com/VerSprite/research/blob/master/advisories/VS-2018-017.md

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