Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in Waves Central for macOS
CVE-2026-86819

8.4HIGH

Key Information:

Vendor

Waves Audio Ltd.

Status
Waves Central
Vendor
CVE Published:
8 September 2026

What is CVE-2026-86819?

The Waves Central for macOS application is susceptible to a local privilege escalation due to improper validation in its privileged helper service. The mechanism currently authorizes connecting XPC clients by comparing code-signing certificate chains directly, instead of ensuring a secure validation against a pinned code requirement based on application identifiers and Team IDs. This vulnerability allows a local, authenticated user to exploit the flawed client validation method to execute arbitrary code with root privileges, potentially compromising system integrity. A patch to address this issue has been released in version 17.0.

Affected Version(s)

Waves Central 16.6.2 < 17.0

Waves Central 17.0

References

https://www.waves.com/downloads/release-notes#v17
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-86819
vdb-entry
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cisagov/CSAF/develop/cs...
third-party-advisory

CVSS V4

Score:
8.4
Severity:
HIGH
Confidentiality:
High
Integrity:
High
Availability:
None
Attack Vector:
Local
Attack Complexity:
Low
Attack Required:
None
Privileges Required:
Undefined
User Interaction:
None

Timeline

  • Vulnerability published

  • Vulnerability Reserved

Credit

Shravan Kumar Sheri, Independent Security Researcher
.