Severity by source
Sources disagree (Medium–Critical)AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
vuln.today treats the vendor’s rating as authoritative. A higher third-party CVSS (e.g. CISA-ADP) is shown for transparency but does not drive the headline severity.
CVSS VectorVendor: microsoft
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
Lifecycle Timeline
2DescriptionCVE.org
Concurrent execution using shared resource with improper synchronization ('race condition') in Windows Push Notifications allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally.
AnalysisAI
Local privilege escalation in Windows Push Notifications enables an authenticated low-privileged user to elevate to higher privileges by exploiting a race condition (CWE-362) in concurrent access to a shared resource. Successful exploitation results in high impact to confidentiality, integrity, and availability with scope change, but no public exploit identified at time of analysis. Microsoft has released a patch via MSRC advisory.
Technical ContextAI
The vulnerability resides in the Windows Push Notification Service (WNS), a Microsoft component responsible for delivering toast and tile notifications to applications on Windows. The root cause is CWE-362 (Concurrent Execution using Shared Resource with Improper Synchronization), commonly known as a race condition or TOCTOU (time-of-check to time-of-use) flaw, where two or more threads operate on a shared resource without proper locking, allowing an attacker to manipulate state between the check and use phases. Such flaws in Windows kernel-adjacent or service components frequently allow privilege escalation when the racing code path performs privileged operations on attacker-controllable data.
RemediationAI
Apply the patch available per Microsoft's MSRC advisory at https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-42977 by deploying the relevant cumulative or security update for each affected Windows version through Windows Update, WSUS, or your enterprise patch management platform. Exact fix build numbers should be obtained from the MSRC update guide as they were not provided in the input data. As a compensating control on systems that cannot be patched immediately, restrict the ability of low-privileged local users to execute arbitrary code (for example via AppLocker or WDAC policies that limit untrusted binaries), since exploitation requires PR:L local access; disabling the Windows Push Notification User Service (WpnUserService) is technically possible but will break toast notifications, Action Center, and many Modern/UWP apps, so this trade-off is generally only acceptable on hardened single-purpose servers.
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Same weakness CWE-362 – Race Condition
View allSame technique Information Disclosure
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External POC / Exploit Code
Leaving vuln.today
EUVD-2026-35739
GHSA-j8g4-4862-cvp2