Critical Lenovo Vantage Flaws Enable SYSTEM User Privilege Escalation for Attackers

Security researchers at Atredis Partners have disclosed three critical vulnerabilities in Lenovo Vantage, a pre-installed management platform found on millions of Lenovo laptops worldwide.

The flaws, tracked as CVE-2025-6230, CVE-2025-6231, and CVE-2025-6232, enable attackers to escalate privileges to SYSTEM-level access, potentially compromising entire systems. Lenovo released patches on July 8th to address all identified issues.

Architecture Vulnerabilities Enable Multiple Attack Vectors

Lenovo Vantage operates through a modular architecture where a central service runs with SYSTEM privileges and communicates with various add-ins via Remote Procedure Call (RPC) endpoints.

The platform’s authentication mechanism relies on digital signature verification, which researchers easily bypassed by leveraging a signed Lenovo binary called FnhotkeyWidget.exe through DLL hijacking techniques.

The first vulnerability (CVE-2025-6230) involves SQL injection flaws in the VantageCoreAddin component.

The DeleteTable and DeleteSetting commands fail to properly sanitize user input when processing requests to the local SQLite database.

Attackers can exploit these vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary SQL queries against the settings database, though direct code execution remains challenging due to SQLite’s security restrictions.

The second critical flaw (CVE-2025-6232) centers on registry manipulation through the Set-KeyChildren command.

While the system attempts to restrict registry writes to HKCU\SOFTWARE\Lenovo, inadequate validation allows attackers to bypass these restrictions using path traversal techniques.

By crafting malicious registry paths, such as “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Lenovo\HKCU\SOFTWARE\Lenovo”, attackers can write to privileged registry locations and potentially modify service configurations for privilege escalation.

Path Traversal and Time-of-Check-Time-of-Use Exploit

The most sophisticated vulnerability (CVE-2025-6231) affects the Lenovo System Update Addin and combines path traversal with a time-of-check-time-of-use (TOCTOU) attack.

The Do-DownloadAndInstallAppComponent command inadequately validates application manifest file paths, allowing attackers to reference arbitrary locations using directory traversal sequences.

Researchers demonstrated how attackers can exploit the non-atomic nature of file validation and reading operations.

By using opportunistic locks and symbolic links, malicious actors can swap legitimate signed manifests with malicious ones between the authentication and execution phases.

This technique enables attackers to execute code with elevated privileges by manipulating installation parameters or leveraging PowerShell execution contexts.

The vulnerabilities affect approximately 20 different Vantage add-ins, with five running under an elevated SYSTEM context.

Organizations should immediately verify that their Lenovo Vantage installations are updated to VantageCoreAddin version 1.0.0.199 or higher, LenovoSystemUpdateAddin version 1.0.24.32 or higher, and ensure the main Vantage application reaches version 10.2501.20.0 or later.

Commercial users should update to Lenovo Commercial Vantage version 20.2506.39.0 or newer.