What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2019-12578

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2019-07-11 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-88

Description

A vulnerability in the London Trust Media Private Internet Access (PIA) VPN Client v82 for Linux could allow an authenticated, local attacker to run arbitrary code with elevated privileges. The openvpn_launcher.64 binary is setuid root. This binary executes /opt/pia/openvpn-64/openvpn, passing the parameters provided from the command line. Care was taken to programmatically disable potentially dangerous openvpn parameters; however, the --route-pre-down parameter can be used. This parameter accepts an arbitrary path to a script/program to be executed when OpenVPN exits. The --script-security parameter also needs to be passed to allow for this action to be taken, and --script-security is not currently in the disabled parameter list. A local unprivileged user can pass a malicious script/binary to the --route-pre-down option, which will be executed as root when openvpn is stopped.

Affected products

• Londontrustmedia Private Internet Access Vpn Client: 82

References

• https://github.com/mirchr/security-research/blob/master/vulnerabilities/PIA/CVE-2019-12578.txt
• https://github.com/mirchr/security-research/blob/master/vulnerabilities/PIA/CVE-2019-12578.txt

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