CVE-2026-24065 PUBLISHED

Local Privilege Escalation via Insecure XPC Client Validation in Waves Central for macOS

Assigner: SEC-VLab
Reserved: 21.01.2026 Published: 09.06.2026 Updated: 09.06.2026

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.

Product Status

Vendor Waves Audio Ltd.
Product Waves Central
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 13.0.9 to 16.5.5 (incl.)

Solutions

The issue is fixed in version 16.6.2 or higher which can be downloaded at the vendor's download page at https://www.waves.com/downloads/central

Credits

  • Florian Haselsteiner, SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-367 Time-of-check time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition CWE

Impacts

  • CAPEC-29 Leveraging Time-of-Check and Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) Race Conditions