CVE-2021-20100 Privilege escalation in Nessus Agent

What is CVE-2021-20100?

CVE-2021-20100 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Tenable Nessus, published on 28 Jun 2021. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Nessus Agent 8.2.4 and earlier for Windows were found to contain multiple local privilege escalation vulnerabilities which could allow an authenticated, local administrator to run specific Windows executables as the Nessus host. This is different than CVE-2021-20099.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-20100?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Tenable Nessus.

How do I fix CVE-2021-20100?

No fix has been published for CVE-2021-20100 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

Is CVE-2021-20100 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-20100 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Tenable Nessus

• CVE-2022-4313 Command injection in Tenable.io, Tenable.sc and Nessus High 8.8
• CVE-2023-0524 Privilege escalation in Tenable.io, Tenable.sc, Nessus High 8.8
• CVE-2023-0101 Privilege escalation in Nessus High 8.8
• CVE-2022-32973 Privilege escalation in Nessus High 8.8
• CVE-2025-36630 Local Privilege Escalation High 8.4

All Tenable Nessus vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-whqq-6mqg-99x7.