What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2019-15752: Docker Desktop Community Edition Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: yes — in CISA KEV since 2021-11-03
• EPSS: 48.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2019-08-28 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-732

Description

Docker Desktop Community Edition before 2.1.0.1 allows local users to gain privileges by placing a Trojan horse docker-credential-wincred.exe file in %PROGRAMDATA%\DockerDesktop\version-bin\ as a low-privilege user, and then waiting for an admin or service user to authenticate with Docker, restart Docker, or run 'docker login' to force the command.

Affected products

• Apache Software Foundation Apache Geode: 1.12.0
• Docker Engine: before 2.1.0.1 — fixed in 2.1.0.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Docker Engine 2.1.0.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/157404/Docker-Credential-Wincred.exe-Privilege-Escalation.html
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rf1bbc0ea4a9f014cf94df9a12a6477d24a27f52741dbc87f2fd52ff2%40%3Cissues.geode.apache.org%3E
• https://medium.com/%40morgan.henry.roman/elevation-of-privilege-in-docker-for-windows-2fd8450b478e
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/157404/Docker-Credential-Wincred.exe-Privilege-Escalation.html
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rf1bbc0ea4a9f014cf94df9a12a6477d24a27f52741dbc87f2fd52ff2%40%3Cissues.geode.apache.org%3E
• https://medium.com/%40morgan.henry.roman/elevation-of-privilege-in-docker-for-windows-2fd8450b478e
• https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog?field_cve=CVE-2019-15752

Get alerted when CVE-2019-15752 or the next vulnerability affects your stack