CVE-2017-2516

medium

Published 2017-05-22 · Modified 2026-05-13

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CVSS v3

5.0

CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

6.0

Description

An issue was discovered in certain Apple products. macOS before 10.12.5 is affected. The issue involves the "Kernel" component. It allows attackers to bypass intended memory-read restrictions via a crafted app.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

50%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-42047 dos macos verified text · 1 KB

Google Security Research · 2017-05-22

Apple macOS - 'stackshot' Raw Frame Pointers

text exploit Source: Exploit-DB

Source: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=1164

This is an issue that allows unentitled root to read kernel frame
pointers, which might be useful in combination with a kernel memory
corruption bug.

By design, the syscall stack_snapshot_with_config() permits unentitled
root to dump information about all user stacks and kernel stacks.
While a target thread, along with the rest of the system, is frozen,
machine_trace_thread64() dumps its kernel stack.
machine_trace_thread64() walks up the kernel stack using the chain of
saved RBPs. It dumps the unslid kernel text pointers together with
unobfuscated frame pointers.

The attached PoC dumps a stackshot into the file stackshot_data.bin
when executed as root. The stackshot contains data like this:

00000a70  de 14 40 00 80 ff ff ff  a0 be 08 77 80 ff ff ff  |..@........w....|
00000a80  7b b8 30 00 80 ff ff ff  20 bf 08 77 80 ff ff ff  |{.0..... ..w....|
00000a90  9e a6 30 00 80 ff ff ff  60 bf 08 77 80 ff ff ff  |..0.....`..w....|
00000aa0  5d ac 33 00 80 ff ff ff  b0 bf 08 77 80 ff ff ff  |].3........w....|

The addresses on the left are unslid kernel text pointers; the
addresses on the right are valid kernel stack pointers.


Proof of Concept:
https://gitlab.com/exploit-database/exploitdb-bin-sploits/-/raw/main/bin-sploits/42047.zip

OS impact

macOS Affected 1 release

Version	Status	Fixed in
—	Affected	—

References

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.