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CISA KEV · ACTIVELY EXPLOITED
HIGH severity

CVE-2023-41974 — IPADOS

HIGH

CVE-2023-41974 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.8) Use After Free vulnerability in apple ipados. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2026-03-05) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.

A use-after-free issue was addressed with improved memory management. This issue is fixed in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, iOS 15.8.7 and iPadOS 15.8.7. An app may be able to execute arbitrary…

Published
Updated
Affected
2 products
Patched
See advisory
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Oct 21, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, CISA KEV, FIRST.org (EPSS)

Exploitation Status

Actively exploited in the wild

  • Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2026-03-05. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2026-03-26.
  • A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.

Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2023-41974.

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
2.0%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk+0.02%
Lower risk than most CVEs80th percentile — riskier than 80% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.00%0.83%1.66%2.49%0.2%2.0%Apr 26Aug 26Oct 26

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.

How urgent is this, really

CVE-2023-41974 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.

Where this sits among everything scored

Of 394,803 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.

Description

A use-after-free issue was addressed with improved memory management. This issue is fixed in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, iOS 15.8.7 and iPadOS 15.8.7. An app may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges.

Affected Products

2 products · 4 configurations
OS
ipadosapple
≥ 16.0 && < 17.0
range
OS
iphone osapple
≥ 16.0 && < 17.0
range

Detection & mitigation playbook

Vendor / appliance

  1. Detect

    Inventory every apple ipados deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.

  2. Fix

    Apply the apple ipados security patch or hotfix for CVE-2023-41974 on the affected version, following the vendor advisory for your exact build.

  3. Workarounds

    Constrain what reaches the vulnerable code: limit the size and shape of untrusted input, isolate the affected component in a sandboxed or least-privileged process, and enable the platform's memory-safety mitigations (ASLR, stack protector, hardened allocator) so an out-of-bounds access is more likely to fail closed than to be exploitable. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.

Frequently Asked Questions

A use-after-free issue was addressed with improved memory management. This issue is fixed in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, iOS 15.8.7 and iPadOS 15.8.7. An app may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges.
O3 Security · Runtime Protection

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CVE-2023-41974: IPADOS Use After Free (High 7.8, KEV)