Cyber Posture

CVE-2025-24789

High

Published: 29 January 2025

Published
29 January 2025
Modified
20 August 2025
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0016 36.2th percentile
Risk Priority 16 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Description

Adversaries may exploit software vulnerabilities in an attempt to elevate privileges.

Security Summary

CVE-2025-24789 is a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Snowflake JDBC Driver, a type 4 driver enabling Java programs to connect to Snowflake data warehouses. The issue arises when the EXTERNALBROWSER authentication method is used on Windows systems, allowing an attacker with write access to a directory in the system's %PATH% environment variable to execute arbitrary code as the user running the vulnerable driver. This untrusted search path flaw, classified under CWE-426, affects versions 3.2.3 through 3.21.0 exclusively on Windows platforms, with a CVSS v3.1 base score of 7.8 (AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H).

A local attacker requires low privileges (PR:L) and write access to any directory listed in the %PATH% to exploit this vulnerability. By placing a malicious executable in that path, the attacker can hijack the driver's execution flow during authentication, leading to full compromise of the affected user's context, including high confidentiality, integrity, and availability impacts.

Snowflake remediated the vulnerability in version 3.22.0 of the JDBC Driver. Security practitioners should immediately upgrade to this patched version. Additional details are available in the GitHub security advisory (GHSA-7hpq-3g6w-pvhf) and the fixing commit (4f01bb8f9b708c71e7a2111c87371dbfc1d53dd6).

Details

CWE(s)
CWE-426

Affected Products

snowflake
snowflake jdbc
3.2.3 — 3.22.0

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques

T1574.008 Path Interception by Search Order Hijacking Stealth
Adversaries may execute their own malicious payloads by hijacking the search order used to load other programs.
T1068 Exploitation for Privilege Escalation Privilege Escalation
Adversaries may exploit software vulnerabilities in an attempt to elevate privileges.
Why these techniques?

Untrusted search path flaw (CWE-426) on Windows allows placing malicious executable in %PATH% directory to hijack driver's execution during EXTERNALBROWSER auth, directly enabling T1574.008 Path Interception by Search Order Hijacking for local privilege escalation (T1068).

Confidence: HIGH · MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise v19.0

References