CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-3187 — An issue was discovered in BeyondTrust Privilege Management for Mac before 5.7

High CVSS 8.8

An issue was discovered in BeyondTrust Privilege Management for Mac before 5.7. An authenticated, unprivileged user can elevate privileges by running a malicious script (that executes as root from a temporary directory) during install time. (This applies to macOS before 10.15.5, or Security Update 2020-003 on Mojave and High Sierra, Later versions of macOS are not vulnerable.)

Severity
High
CVSS
8.8 (3.1)
Published
2023-12-11
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-276

Affected products

  • beyondtrust / privilege_management_for_mac

Matched remediation archetype

Privilege escalation and unsafe privilege management

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Map service accounts, operating-system identities, roles, capabilities, impersonation, set-user transitions, and administrative helper paths.
  • Determine whether untrusted users or lower-privilege processes can reach the affected transition or modify inputs it trusts.
  • Review file, socket, registry, device, job, container, and cloud-role permissions used before and after privilege changes.

Remediate safely

  • Apply the supported fix and redesign privileged operations as a minimal, authenticated, allowlisted interface.
  • Drop privileges before processing untrusted input, verify the drop succeeds, and remove unnecessary roles, capabilities, and write permissions.
  • Validate ownership and permissions at time of use and add explicit lower-to-higher privilege boundary tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.