What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-86819: Waves Central local privilege escalation via Improper XPC Client Authentication in macOS

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.1 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-09-08 · updated 2026-09-14
• Weakness: CWE-862

Description

Waves Central for macOS contains a local privilege escalation in the privileged helper service. The helper authorizes connecting XPC clients by comparing the caller's code-signing certificate chain for equality with its own, rather than validating the caller against a pinned code requirement (application identifier and Team ID). A local, authenticated user can execute code within the vendor-signed process, satisfy the helper's client check, and cause the helper to execute a script with root privileges. Fixed in 17.0.

Affected products

• Waves Audio Ltd. Waves Central: from 16.6.2 before 17.0 — fixed in 17.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Waves Audio Ltd. Waves Central 17.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cisagov/CSAF/develop/csaf_files/IT/white/2026/va-26-251-02.json
• https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-86819
• https://www.waves.com/downloads/release-notes#v17

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