Local Privilege Escalation in Sparkle Autoupdate Daemon
CVE-2025-10016

8.8HIGH

Key Information:

Vendor

Sparkle Project

Status
Sparkle
Vendor
CVE Published:
16 September 2025

What is CVE-2025-10016?

The Sparkle framework includes a helper tool Autoupdate. Due to lack of authentication of connecting clients a local unprivileged attacker can request installation of crafted malicious PKG file by racing to connect to the daemon when other app spawns it as root. This results in local privilege escalation to root privileges. It is worth noting that it is possible to spawn Autopudate manually via Installer XPC service. However this requires the victim to enter credentials upon system authorization dialog creation that can be modified by the attacker.

This issue was fixed in version 2.7.2

Affected Version(s)

Sparkle MacOS 0 < 2.7.2

References

https://cert.pl/en/posts/2025/09/CVE-2025-10015
third-party-advisory
https://github.com/sparkle-project/Sparkle
product
https://github.com/sparkle-project/Sparkle/discussions/2764
vendor-advisory

CVSS V4

Score:
8.8
Severity:
HIGH
Confidentiality:
High
Integrity:
High
Availability:
High
Attack Vector:
Local
Attack Complexity:
Low
Attack Required:
Physical
Privileges Required:
Undefined
User Interaction:
None

Timeline

  • Vulnerability published

  • Vulnerability Reserved

Credit

Karol Mazurek - Afine Team
.
CVE-2025-10016 : Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in Sparkle Framework by Sparkle