What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2024-29187: WiX based installers are vulnerable to binary hijack when run as SYSTEM

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.3 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: 2024-03-24 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-732

Description

WiX toolset lets developers create installers for Windows Installer, the Windows installation engine. When a bundle runs as SYSTEM user, Burn uses GetTempPathW which points to an insecure directory C:\Windows\Temp to drop and load multiple binaries. Standard users can hijack the binary before it's loaded in the application resulting in elevation of privileges. This vulnerability is fixed in 3.14.1 and 4.0.5.

Affected products

• Wixtoolset Project Burn: before 3.14.1; from 4.0.0 before 4.0.5 — fixed in 3.14.1, 4.0.5

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Wixtoolset Project Burn 3.14.1, 4.0.5. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/wixtoolset/issues/security/advisories/GHSA-rf39-3f98-xr7r
• https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix/commit/75a8c75d4e02ea219008dc5af7d03869291d61f7
• https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix3/commit/6d372e5169f1a334a395cdf496443bc0732098e9
• https://github.com/wixtoolset/issues/security/advisories/GHSA-rf39-3f98-xr7r
• https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix/commit/75a8c75d4e02ea219008dc5af7d03869291d61f7
• https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix3/commit/6d372e5169f1a334a395cdf496443bc0732098e9

Get alerted when CVE-2024-29187 or the next vulnerability affects your stack