CVE-2017-13872

high

Published 2017-11-29 · Modified 2026-05-13

💬 Discuss on Community ✚ Propose mitigation

CVSS v3

8.1

CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

9.1

Description

An issue was discovered in certain Apple products. macOS High Sierra before Security Update 2017-001 is affected. The issue involves the "Directory Utility" component. It allows attackers to obtain administrator access without a password via certain interactions involving entry of the root user name.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

88%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Metasploit modules

auxiliary_scanner/vnc/ard_root_pw rank 300

Apple Remote Desktop Root Vulnerability

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

exploit_osx/local/root_no_password rank 600

Mac OS X Root Privilege Escalation

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

OS impact

OS	Version	Status	Fixed in
macos	10.13.0	affected
macos	10.13.1	affected

References

CWEs

CWE-287

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.