Security researchers at Atredis Partners have uncovered a series of privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Lenovo Vantage, the pre-installed management utility found on millions of Lenovo laptops.
The flaws, tracked as CVE-2025-6230, CVE-2025-6231, and CVE-2025-6232, could allow attackers to gain SYSTEM-level privileges and execute malicious code, putting business and personal users at risk. Lenovo has issued critical patches (LEN-196648) to mitigate all identified issues.
Architectural Weaknesses Enable Attack Chain
Lenovo Vantage’s architecture is rooted in a modular C# framework that exposes several plug-in “add-in” modules through named Remote Procedure Call (RPC) endpoints.
While the architectural choice fosters extensibility, it also simplifies reverse engineering for attackers due to ease of recovering high-level code from compiled Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL).
The primary Vantage service, running as SYSTEM, routes incoming JSON-formatted requests to registered add-ins, some of which also execute under high privilege.
Authentication relies on verifying that the connecting client’s binary is digitally signed by Lenovo a safeguard easily subverted through DLL hijacking or process injection with Lenovo-signed binaries.
Of the twenty or so available add-ins, five including CommercialAddin, LenovoAuthenticationAddin, LenovoHardwareScanAddin, LenovoSystemUpdateAddin, and VantageCoreAddin default to SYSTEM-level execution.
Atredis’s research focused on two of these: VantageCoreAddin and LenovoSystemUpdateAddin, uncovering particularly severe issues in each.
Exploitable SQL Injection
CVE-2025-6230 encompasses multiple SQL injection vulnerabilities within VantageCoreAddin’s request handlers for local settings management.
By failing to properly sanitize table name parameters in delete commands, attackers can engineer stacked arbitrary queries against the sensitive SYSTEM-owned settings SQLite database.
While extensions like user-defined functions are disabled by default, an attacker has avenues to manipulate or destroy the database and create arbitrary files with crafted content.
CVE-2025-6232 addresses a flaw in registry permissions enforcement. The Set-KeyChildren handler attempts to enforce a strict allowlist on HKCU registry writes by performing a naive substring match, which is trivially bypassed.
Attackers can pivot to writable Lenovo registry keys under the HKLM hive a misconfiguration present on numerous Lenovo endpoints.
Through a sequence of steps involving DACL changes, subkey inheritance, and registry symlink creation, it becomes possible to redirect privileged writes, ultimately enabling the modification of critical system keys such as service ImagePath.
This could allow an attacker to launch arbitrary binaries as SYSTEM by reconfiguring auto-starting services.
CVE-2025-6231 targets the LenovoSystemUpdateAddin, combining a directory traversal bug and a race-condition (TOCTOU) in the way application manifests are accessed and validated.
The InstallOny action accepts attacker-controlled AppID values, constructing file paths with insufficient validation.
While a digital signature check is performed before reading the manifest, the check and read are not atomic an attacker can use opportunistic file locks and path redirection (via symlinks) between these steps.
This allows the loading of a malicious manifest, under the guise of a trusted one. Ultimately, attackers gain full control over installation parameters, enabling privilege escalation through crafted commands and abusing installer contexts.
Although a weak mitigation limits execution to “approved” paths, this restriction can be bypassed in certain cases.
Users are strongly urged to update Lenovo Vantage and its core add-ins immediately.
The vulnerabilities are addressed in VantageCoreAddin version 1.0.0.199 and LenovoSystemUpdateAddin version 1.0.24.32, as well as in Lenovo Vantage 10.2501.20.0 and Commercial Vantage 20.2506.39.0.
It is recommended to verify installation paths and add-in XML descriptors to ensure patched versions are deployed.
These vulnerabilities highlight the ongoing risks associated with privileged system tools and the need for robust architectural defense-in-depth in endpoint management applications.
The discoveries also underline the importance of rigorous input validation and secure inter-process communication practices within trusted computing components.
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