Cyber Posture

CVE-2025-25003

High

Published: 11 March 2025

Published
11 March 2025
Modified
01 July 2025
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score 7.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0032 55.3th percentile
Risk Priority 15 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Description

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

Security Summary

CVE-2025-25003 is an uncontrolled search path element vulnerability (CWE-427) in Visual Studio. Published on 2025-03-11T17:16:38.043, it carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 7.3 (AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H), indicating high potential impact from local exploitation.

A local attacker with low privileges (PR:L) can exploit this vulnerability with low attack complexity (AC:L), provided they induce user interaction (UI:R). Successful exploitation enables privilege escalation, resulting in high impacts to confidentiality, integrity, and availability (C:H/I:H/A:H) within the local scope (S:U).

The Microsoft Security Response Center advisory at https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2025-25003 details mitigation strategies and available patches for addressing this issue.

Details

CWE(s)
CWE-427

Affected Products

microsoft
visual studio 2019
16.0 — 16.11.45
microsoft
visual studio 2022
17.8.0 — 17.8.19 · 17.10.0 — 17.10.12 · 17.12.0 — 17.12.6

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques

T1574.001 DLL Stealth
Adversaries may abuse dynamic-link library files (DLLs) in order to achieve persistence, escalate privileges, and evade defenses.
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?

Uncontrolled search path element (CWE-427) directly enables DLL side-loading and path interception by search order hijacking to load attacker-controlled code, facilitating local privilege escalation.

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

References