What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-17396

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2020-08-25 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-190

Description

This vulnerability allows local attackers to escalate privileges on affected installations of Parallels Desktop 15.1.4. An attacker must first obtain the ability to execute low-privileged code on the target system in order to exploit this vulnerability. The specific flaw exists within the prl_hypervisor module. The issue results from the lack of proper validation of user-supplied data, which can result in an integer overflow before allocating a buffer. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to escalate privileges and execute code in the context of the kernel. Was ZDI-CAN-11217.

Affected products

• Parallels Desktop: before 16.0.0 — fixed in 16.0.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Parallels Desktop 16.0.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://kb.parallels.com/en/125013
• https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-20-1014/
• https://kb.parallels.com/en/125013
• https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-20-1014/

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