What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2024-29188: Malicious directory junction can cause WiX RemoveFoldersEx to possibly delete elevated files

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.9 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% 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-59

Description

WiX toolset lets developers create installers for Windows Installer, the Windows installation engine. The custom action behind WiX's `RemoveFolderEx` functionality could allow a standard user to delete protected directories. `RemoveFolderEx` deletes an entire directory tree during installation or uninstallation. It does so by recursing every subdirectory starting at a specified directory and adding each subdirectory to the list of directories Windows Installer should delete. If the setup author instructed `RemoveFolderEx` to delete a per-user folder from a per-machine installer, an attacker could create a directory junction in that per-user folder pointing to a per-machine, protected directory. Windows Installer, when executing the per-machine installer after approval by an administrator, would delete the target of the directory junction. This vulnerability is fixed in 3.14.1 and 4.0.5.

Affected products

• wixtoolset issues: before 3.14.1; from 4.0.0, < 4.0.5

References

• https://github.com/wixtoolset/issues/security/advisories/GHSA-jx4p-m4wm-vvjg
• https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix/commit/2e5960b575881567a8807e6b8b9c513138b19742
• https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix3/commit/93eeb5f6835776694021f66d4226c262c67d487a
• https://github.com/wixtoolset/issues/security/advisories/GHSA-jx4p-m4wm-vvjg
• https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix/commit/2e5960b575881567a8807e6b8b9c513138b19742
• https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix3/commit/93eeb5f6835776694021f66d4226c262c67d487a

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