Qualcomm is the market-dominant hardware vendor for non-Apple smartphones. Considering the [SoCs] they produce are predominant, it has become increasingly interesting to reverse-engineer and take over their boot chain in order to get a hold onto the highest-privileged components while they are executing. Ultimately, the objective is to be able to experiment with closed-source and/or undocumented components such as hardware registers or Trusted Execution Environment Software.

On September 2018, FreeBSD published the security advisory FreeBSD-SA-18:12, fixing a kernel memory disclosure vulnerability affecting all the supported versions of this operating system.

Given the popularity of GDI Bitmap objects for exploitation of kernel vulnerabilities -due to the fact that almost any kind of memory corruption vulnerability (except for NULL-writes) could be used to reliably gain arbitrary R/W primitives over the kernel memory by abusing Bitmaps- Microsoft decided to kill exploitation techniques based on Bitmaps. In order to do this, Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (also known as Windows 10 1709) introduced the Type Isolation feature, an exploitation mitigation in the Win32k subsystem, which splits the memory layout of SURFACE objects, the internal representation of Bitmaps on the kernel side. This blogpost takes a deep dive into the details of how Type Isolation is implemented.

On February 9, 2017, Natalie Silvanovich from Google Project Zero unrestricted access to P0's issue #983 [1], titled "Microsoft Edge: Use-after-free in TypedArray.sort", which got assigned CVE-2016-7288 and was patched as part of Microsoft security bulletin MS16-145 [2] during December 2016. In this blog post we discuss how I managed to exploit this UAF issue to obtain remote code execution on MS Edge.

On September 13th, 2016 Microsoft released security bulletin MS16-104 [1], which addresses several vulnerabilities affecting Internet Explorer. One of those vulnerabilities is CVE-2016-3353, a security feature bypass bug in the way .URL files are handled. This security issue does not allow for remote code execution by itself; instead, it allows attackers to bypass a security warning in attacks involving user interaction. In this blogpost we discuss the whole process, from reverse engineering the patch to building a Proof-of-Concept for this vulnerability.

This is the last part of our blogpost series about Xen security [1] [2]. This time we write about a vulnerability we found (XSA-182) [0] (CVE-2016-6258) and his exploitation on Qubes OS [3] project.

This blog post describes the exploitation of Xen Security Advisory 148 (XSA-148) [1] (CVE-2015-7835). It has been discovered by Shangcong Luan of Alibaba and publicly disclosed in October 2015. At the time, we were working on writing an exploit and no public proof of concept nor exploit were available. Today, the security researcher responsible of the vulnerability disclosure has given a public talk [6] and will give conferences explaining his approach [7]. We decided to publish this blogpost anyway because our exploitation strategy is a little bit different.

This blog post describes the exploitation of Xen Security Advisory 105 (XSA-105) [1] (CVE-2014-7155). This post explains the environment setup and shows the development of a fully working exploit on Linux 4.4.5.

Nowadays, two-factor authentication is unavoidable. This blogpost details a vulnerability found in the implementation of a YubiKey OTP verification server.

Eloi Vanderbéken recently found a backdoor on some common routers, which is described on his GitHub here. Basically, a process that listens on the 32764 TCP port runs, sometimes accessible from the WAN interface. We scanned the v4 Internet to look for the routers that have this backdoor wild open, and gathered some statistics about them. We will also present a way to permanently remove this backdoor on Linksys WAG200G routers.