Summary
Impact: Elevation of Privilege. Microsoft rating: Important. Not known to be exploited — Exploitation Less Likely. Customer action: Required.
Details
According to the CVSS metric, user interaction is required (UI:R). What interaction would the user have to do?
Exploitation of this vulnerability requires that a local user executes the Visual Studio installer
What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability?
An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges.
According to the CVSS metric, privileges required is low (PR:L). What does that mean for this vulnerability?
Any authenticated attacker could trigger this vulnerability. It does not require admin or other elevated privileges.
Security updates
15.9.70 — https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releasenotes/vs2017-relnotes
16.11.44 — https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2019/release-notes-v16.11
17.8.18 — https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022/release-notes
Vulnerabilities 1
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High 7.3
Visual Studio Installer Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
Visual Studio Installer Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
Revision history
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#1
Information published.
References
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CVE-2025-21206 Visual Studio Installer Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability - HTML
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2025-21206
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Microsoft Exploitability Index
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/exploitability-index?rtc=1
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Microsoft Support Lifecycle
https://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle
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Common Vulnerability Scoring System
https://www.first.org/cvss