Vulnerability Spotlight: BlueStacks App Player Privilege Escalation

Discovered by Marcin ‘Icewall’ Noga of Cisco Talos

Talos is releasing an advisory for a vulnerability in BlueStacks App Player. (TALOS-2016-0124/CVE-2016-4288). The BlueStacks App Player is designed to enable Android applications to run on Windows PCs and Macintosh computers. It’s commonly used to run popular Android games on these platforms.

Details

A weak registry key permission vulnerability exists in the BlueStacks application. By default the BlueStack installer sets a weak permission to the registry key, which contains InstallDir reg value, this can be used later by the BlueStacks service component. This default configuration gives a malicious user the ability to modify this value, which can lead to privilege escalation.