CVE-2017-3898 — A man-in-the-middle attack vulnerability in the non-certificate-based authentica

A man-in-the-middle attack vulnerability in the non-certificate-based authentication mechanism in McAfee LiveSafe (MLS) versions prior to 16.0.3 allows network attackers to modify the Windows registry value associated with the McAfee update via the HTTP backend-response.

01What is this vulnerability?

A man-in-the-middle attack vulnerability in the non-certificate-based authentication mechanism in McAfee LiveSafe (MLS) versions prior to 16.0.3 allows network attackers to modify the Windows registry value associated with the McAfee update via the HTTP backend-response.

02Affected products

No structured affected-product list available — see references below for vendor advisories.

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2017-09-01T13:29:00.537
• Last modified: 2026-05-13T00:24:29.033

09References

• service.mcafee.com — http://service.mcafee.com/FAQDocument.aspx?lc=1033&id=TS102723
• service.mcafee.com — http://service.mcafee.com/FAQDocument.aspx?lc=1033&id=TS102723