The fixed vulnerability allowed an attacker to escalate his privileges to SYSTEM on a system that the attacker already had access to.

This was possible by using COM-Hijacking to execute code in the context of a trusted front-end process. The trust between the front end and the back end was then abused to write registry values as SYSTEM, allowing an attacker to execute code as SYSTEM.

We want to thank Bitdefender for their exemplary reaction to the vulnerability report.

CVSS Score
7.8 (CVSS v3) – https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-6154

CVSS Vector String
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected Versions
Total Security: 27.0.25.114; Internet Security: 27.0.25.114; Antivirus Plus: 27.0.25.114; Antivirus Free: 27.0.25.114.

Fixed Version
27.0.25.115

References
https://www.bitdefender.com/support/security-advisories/local-privilege-escalation-in-bitdefender-total-security-va-11168/

Credits
Kolja Grassmann (cirosec GmbH) and Alain Rödel (Neodyme)