CVE-2020-11081: osquery susceptible to DLL search order hijacking of zlib1.dll

Severity: high (CVSS 8.2 v3.1)
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: yes
Published: 2020-07-10 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-114

Description

osquery before version 4.4.0 enables a privilege escalation vulnerability. If a Window system is configured with a PATH that contains a user-writable directory then a local user may write a zlib1.dll DLL, which osquery will attempt to load. Since osquery runs with elevated privileges this enables local escalation. This is fixed in version 4.4.0.

Affected products

osquery: before 4.4.0 — fixed in 4.4.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: osquery 4.4.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

https://github.com/osquery/osquery/commit/4d4957f12a6aa0becc9d01d9f97061e1e3d809c5
https://github.com/osquery/osquery/issues/6426
https://github.com/osquery/osquery/pull/6433
https://github.com/osquery/osquery/releases/tag/4.4.0
https://github.com/osquery/osquery/security/advisories/GHSA-2xwp-8fv7-c5pm
https://github.com/osquery/osquery/commit/4d4957f12a6aa0becc9d01d9f97061e1e3d809c5
https://github.com/osquery/osquery/issues/6426
https://github.com/osquery/osquery/pull/6433
https://github.com/osquery/osquery/releases/tag/4.4.0
https://github.com/osquery/osquery/security/advisories/GHSA-2xwp-8fv7-c5pm

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