CVE-2026-24071 is a high-severity TOCTOU race condition vulnerability in Native Instruments' Native Access software, affecting versions up to 3.22.0. The vulnerability arises because the privileged helper's XPC service verifies client code signatures based on the client's PID, which is susceptible to PID reuse attacks. An attacker with low privileges can exploit this flaw to impersonate a trusted process, potentially gaining elevated privileges and causing full compromise of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Exploitation requires local access and high attack complexity but does not require user interaction. No known exploits are currently in the wild. European organizations using Native Access for managing Native Instruments products are at risk, especially those in music production, audio engineering, and related creative industries. Mitigation involves applying vendor patches once available, restricting local access to trusted users, and monitoring for suspicious local IPC activity. Countries with significant creative industries and high adoption of Native Instruments software, such as Germany, the UK, France, and the Netherlands, are most likely to be affected.
During the installation of the Native Access application, a privileged helper `com.native-instruments.NativeAccess.Helper2`, which is used by Native Access to trigger functions via XPC communication like copy-file, remove or set-permissions, is deployed as well. The communication with the XPC service of the privileged helper is only allowed if the client process is signed with the corresponding certificate and fulfills the following code signing requirement:
"anchor trusted and certificate leaf[subject.CN] = \"Developer ID Application: Native Instruments GmbH (83K5EG6Z9V)\""
The Native Access application was found to be signed with the `com.apple.security.cs.allow-dyld-environment-variables` and `com.apple.security.cs.disable-library-validation` entitlements leading to DYLIB injection and therefore command execution in the context of this application. A low privileged user can exploit the DYLIB injection to trigger functions of the privileged helper XPC service resulting in privilege escalation by first deleting the /etc/sudoers file and then copying a malicious version of that file to /etc/sudoers.
