Description

Recently, a critical flaw, designated CVE-2025-59489, was discovered in Unity Technologies real-time game engine and game development platform. Unity Editor versions after 2017.1, and millions of programs and games utilizing these platforms, are therefore at risk of potential breaches of security. This bug involves a vulnerable method for loading files, which opens up possibility for attacks that will allow unauthorized programs to run and provide deeper access on many operating systems. Android apps, in fact, have been made highly vulnerable, but Windows, macOS, and Linux platforms remain highly vulnerable, too, when custom URI handlers are utilized. The root cause is an untrusted search path (CWE-426). This allows attackers to exploit the mechanism that Unity applications use to locate and load files. Researchers for GMO Flatt Security Inc. publicly disclosed the flaw in a responsible manner on June 4, 2025. Attackers who have local access to the vulnerable system may exploit this weakness to execute any code within the application, which could allow them to extract sensitive information. Exploitation in Windows systems broadens the attack surface, and thus, in such configurations, the flaw is even more perilous if direct command-line access is not needed. In order to mitigate this threat, Unity Technologies has provided security patches for all supported editions of the Unity Editor and for certain older ones. Devs should recompile the vulnerable apps with the newer editions of Unity or deploy binary patches from Unity's patching tool. It is highly recommended that apps built with older, unsupported versions (2017.1 through 2018.4) should be updated soon because they do not have any patches available for them. There is currently no hint of active exploitation, but it is better to do these soon in order to minimize potential harm.