Reverse Engineering the Win32k Type Isolation Mitigation

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.

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Exploiting MS16-145: MS Edge TypedArray.sort Use-After-Free (CVE-2016-7288)

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.

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Analysis of MS16-104: .URL files Security Feature Bypass (CVE-2016-3353)

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.

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Windows 8 ate my cookie

Modern OSes have a feature that mitigates the exploitation of stack based buffer overflows. It basically works by writing a "cookie" value before the return address in the stack in the prologue of a function and checking it before the function returns (for further information, see [1] and [2]). This article talks about how this mitigation has been enforced in Windows 8.

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Visual C++ RTTI Inspection

C++ is well-known to be tedious to analyze, the use of both inheritance and polymorphism (i.e. virtual method) makes the compiler generate indirect calls. Usually, this kind of assembly code forces the reverse engineer to execute the code in order to figure out the destination of a call. In fact, we are looking for the VFT (Virtual Function Table). This table contains all virtual methods for a specific instance of a class. This article shows how to retrieve this information to make the analysis of a C++ software easier.

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Quarks PwDump

Quarks PwDump is new open source tool to dump various types of Windows credentials: local account, domain accounts, cached domain credentials and bitlocker. The tool is currently dedicated to work live on operating systems limiting the risk of undermining their integrity or stability. It requires administrator's privileges and is still in beta test.

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