GOG Galaxy riddled with multilple security vulnerabilities

• The gaming client was found to have multiple privilege escalation flaws that could allow attackers to overwrite applications and launch arbitrary codes.
• Security researchers from Cisco Talos identified the flaws in this platform.

GOG Galaxy, a popular gaming client which allows users to buy games and run them on a desktop, was found to have multiple security vulnerabilities. Security researchers Richard Johnson and Tyler Bohan of Cisco Talos discovered these flaws existing in the client. It was reported that the version 1.2.48.36 of GOG Galaxy had these issues.

What are the vulnerabilities?

• A total of six major vulnerabilities were identified in GOG Galaxy. Out of this, four were privilege escalation flaws followed by an information disclosure and a denial-of-service(DoS) vulnerability.
• The privilege escalation flaws could be exploited from the ‘Temp’ directory (CVE-2018-4048), ‘Games’ directory(CVE-2018-4049) and a helper tool(CVE-2018-4050) when GOG Galaxy was installed on Windows systems. Similarly, the helper tool on GOG for macOS also had a privilege escalation flaw (CVE-2018-4051).
• The helper tool of the client also contained an information disclosure flaw (CVE-2018-4052), whereby attackers could obtain sensitive information which is only available to a root user.
• It also had a DoS flaw (CVE-2018-4053) which can be exploited by corrupting the root-listening service in GOG Galaxy.

What can be done about it?

All of these flaws has been addressed in the latest version of GOG Galaxy. “Users are encouraged to update to the latest version of GOG Galaxy Games here as soon as possible in order to avoid these vulnerabilities. As they all come from different functions, there is no one, clear workaround and they can only be fixed through this patch,” the Cisco Talos blog noted.

A tough time for gamers

This is the second instance of major vulnerabilities striking the gaming world within last one week. Earlier, NVIDIA fixed a critical vulnerability that enabled DoS attacks in its GeForce GPU series. It affected the GeForce Experience software when NVIDIA processes such as GameStream, ShadowPlay or NvContainer were running in the background.