CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-28142 — A Race Condition exists in the Qualys Cloud Agent for Windows platform in versions from 3.1.3.34 and before 4.5.3.1

High CVSS 7

A Race Condition exists in the Qualys Cloud Agent for Windows platform in versions from 3.1.3.34 and before 4.5.3.1. This allows attackers to escalate privileges limited on the local machine during uninstallation of the Qualys Cloud Agent for Windows. Attackers may gain SYSTEM level privileges on that asset to run arbitrary commands. At the time of this disclosure, versions before 4.0 are classified as End of Life.

Severity
High
CVSS
7 (3.1)
Published
2023-04-18
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
windows/system
Weaknesses
CWE-362

Affected products

  • qualys / cloud_agent

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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

Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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