Waves Audio Ltd. vulnerabilities and threats

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.

Waves Central for macOS versions 13.0.9 through 16.5.5 contain a local privilege escalation vulnerability in the privileged helper service. The helper validates connecting XPC clients using the client process identifier (PID) to verify code-signing identity. Because process identifiers can be reused, a local attacker can exploit a race condition between the time a connection request is made and the time the helper performs validation, causing the helper to trust an attacker-controlled process. This allows the attacker to invoke privileged operations, resulting in arbitrary code execution as root. The issue is fixed in version 16.6.2.

Waves Central for macOS versions 13.0.9 through 16.5.5 contains a local privilege escalation vulnerability due to an untrusted search path. A trusted XPC client component allows dynamic library injection via the DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES environment variable. This enables a local attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges. The vulnerability is fixed in version 16.6.2.