CVE-2018-15490

Severity: high (CVSS 7.1 v3.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2019-01-02 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-22

Description

An issue was discovered in ExpressVPN on Windows. The Xvpnd.exe process (which runs as a service with SYSTEM privileges) listens on TCP port 2015, which is used as an RPC interface for communication with the client side of the ExpressVPN application. A JSON-RPC protocol over HTTP is used for communication. The JSON-RPC XVPN.GetPreference and XVPN.SetPreference methods are vulnerable to path traversal, and allow reading and writing files on the file system on behalf of the service.

Affected products

Expressvpn: all versions

References

https://medium.com/%40Wflki/https-medium-com-wflki-cve-2018-15490-expressvpn-local-privilege-escalation-d22c86fecc47
https://medium.com/%40Wflki/https-medium-com-wflki-cve-2018-15490-expressvpn-local-privilege-escalation-d22c86fecc47

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