CVE-2026-82964: CWE-281: Improper Preservation of Permissions in Gen Digital Avast Free Antivirus, Avast One, Avast Premium Security, Avast Ultimate, Avast Business Security
Improper preservation of permissions in the Avast sandbox minifilter driver (aswSnx.sys) on Windows allows a local, low-privileged attacker executing inside the sandbox to escape file isolation and escalate to SYSTEM. When the sandbox virtualizes a file it copies the original security descriptor, but the driver opened the virtualization target object with GENERIC_WRITE and FILE_WRITE_ATTRIBUTES only, omitting WRITE_DAC. Every attempt to apply the original DACL therefore failed, and the failure was discarded silently, leaving virtualized copies of sensitive files with permissive permissions. Because the IRP_MJ_CREATE callback additionally did not strip WRITE_DAC for sensitive directories, a sandboxed process could rewrite the security descriptor of a virtualized object, read the virtualized copy of the SAM database, extract local NTLM password hashes and execute code as SYSTEM. The absence of an IRP_MJ_SET_SECURITY callback in the driver's operation registration table is a related defense-in-depth gap, but it is not the control that prevents this attack.
CVE-2026-82964: CWE-281: Improper Preservation of Permissions in Gen Digital Avast Free Antivirus, Avast One, Avast Premium Security, Avast Ultimate, Avast Business Security
Description
Improper preservation of permissions in the Avast sandbox minifilter driver (aswSnx.sys) on Windows allows a local, low-privileged attacker executing inside the sandbox to escape file isolation and escalate to SYSTEM. When the sandbox virtualizes a file it copies the original security descriptor, but the driver opened the virtualization target object with GENERIC_WRITE and FILE_WRITE_ATTRIBUTES only, omitting WRITE_DAC. Every attempt to apply the original DACL therefore failed, and the failure was discarded silently, leaving virtualized copies of sensitive files with permissive permissions. Because the IRP_MJ_CREATE callback additionally did not strip WRITE_DAC for sensitive directories, a sandboxed process could rewrite the security descriptor of a virtualized object, read the virtualized copy of the SAM database, extract local NTLM password hashes and execute code as SYSTEM. The absence of an IRP_MJ_SET_SECURITY callback in the driver's operation registration table is a related defense-in-depth gap, but it is not the control that prevents this attack.
CVSS v3.1
Score 8.8high
Affected software
Gen Digital
Avast Free Antivirus, Avast One, Avast Premium Security, Avast Ultimate, Avast Business Security
Gen Digital
AVG Antivirus Free, AVG Internet Security, AVG Ultimate
Gen Digital
Norton Antivirus Plus, Norton 360 Standard, Norton 360 Deluxe, Norton 360 Advanced
Weaknesses
Technical Details
- Data Version
- 5.2
- Assigner Short Name
- GEN
- Date Reserved
- 2026-08-31T13:57:13.454Z
- Cvss Version
- 3.1
- State
- PUBLISHED
Threat ID: 6aaaa87255bf5e2cf5bb988e
Added to database: 09/16/2026, 14:32:18 UTC
Last updated: 09/16/2026, 14:32:18 UTC
Views: 1
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