j00ru//vx tech blog Coding, reverse engineering, OS internals covered one more time

5Sep/105

Kernel exploitation – r0 to r3 transitions via KeUserModeCallback

Hey there!

I have recently came across (well, not entirely by myself... cheers Nahuel!) a fairly (un)common problem related to performing ring0-to-ring3 transitions, after a successful kernel vulnerability exploitation. As I have managed to come up with a bunch of possible solutions, and even write exemplary code for some of these, today I would like to present my thoughts, together with some brief explanation.

27Jul/104

Windows CSRSS Write Up: Inter-process Communication (part 2/3)

A quick beginning note: My friend d0c_s4vage has created a technical blog and posted his first text just a few days ago. The post entry covers a recent, critical libpng vulnerability discovered by this guy; the interesting thing is that, among others, the latest Firefox and Chrome versions were vulnerable. Feel free to take a minute and read the article here.

Additionally, the video and mp3 recordings from the presentation performed by me and Gynvael on the CONFidence 2010 conference, are now publicly available on the official website: link (Case study of recent Windows vulnerabilities).

13Jul/104

Windows CSRSS Write Up: Inter-process Communication (part 1/3)

In the second post of the Windows CSRSS Write Up series, I would like to explain how the practical communication between the Windows Subsystem and user's process takes place under the hood. Due to the fact that some major improvements have been introduced in Windows Vista and later, the entire article is split into two parts - the first one giving an insight at what the communication channel really is, as well as how is it taken advantage of by both CSRSS and a user processes. The second one, on the other hand, is going to talk through the modifications and new features shipped with the Windows systems starting from Vista, as most of the basic ideas remain the same for decades. As you already know what to expect, proceed to the next section :-)

8Jul/102

Windows CSRSS Write Up: the basics (part 1/1)

NOTE: The following post entry opens a series of CSRSS-oriented articles, aiming at describing the uncovered CSRSS mechanism internals, present in the Windows OS for more than fifteen years now. Although some great research has already been carried out by a few curious guys (check out the references), no thorough case study is available until now. In this series, I am going to cover both the very basic ideas and their implementations, as well as the recent CSRSS changes applied in modern operating systems (i.e. Windows 7). And so, just have a good read! ;)

3Jul/104

Attacking the Host via Remote Kernel Debugger (Virtual Machines)

NOTE: This post is highly related to the research performed by Alex Ionescu. He is going to present the results of his work on the RECON2010 conference, during his Debugger-based Target-to-Host Cross-System Attacks speech. As it turns out, me and Alex have been working on the same subject concurrently - while I have only managed to perform cursory analysis of the mechanism, Alex has carried out a thorough analysis and possibly developed a PoC for a real vulnerability ;) Besides this, I would like to share some of my ideas and conclusions which I came up with, during a short period of the recent weeks ;)

19Jun/100

A quick insight into the Driver Signature Enforcement

Hey!

I have recently had some fun playing around with driver signing on Windows x64, and so I like to share some matters that have came into my head ;) Therefore, let me briefly describe some internal mechanisms lying behind well known Driver Signature Enforcement, a significant part of the Code Integrity feature introduced by Microsoft in Windows Vista and Windows 7. Understanding the underlying system behavior would let us think of possible attack vectors against the protection, as well as better apprehend the existing techniques, such as the ones developed by Joanna Rutkowska or Alex Ionescu. Let the fun begin!

30May/103

CONFidence 2010 is over

One of the biggest (best ;) ) IT security-oriented conferences in Poland finished three days ago, in the wednesday evening. In the very first place, I would like to congratulate all the organisers, for their decision on where the event should be held, as well as how it should look like - during these two days, I had plenty of real fun!

2May/108

Windows CSRSS cross-version API Table

Hello!

It seems like half a year has passed since I published the Win32k.SYS system call table list on the net. During this time (well, it didn't take so long ;) ) I managed to gather enough information to release yet another API list - this time, concerning an user-mode application - CSRSS (Client/Server Runtime SubSystem). As a relatively common research subject, I think a table of this kind can make things easier for lots of people.

22Apr/102

Windows Kernel Vulnerabilities continued – details

And so it happened ;> As I've written in this post, Gynvael Coldwind has just finished speaking about recent Windows Kernel Vulnerabilities on the Hack In The Box Dubai conference, taking place today. Unfortunately, because of the European air communication being disabled these days, the presentation was held remotely - one way or another, it can be considered very successful, imho.

Thanks to the organisers, who publish the materials right after the speeches are over, all of the slides are now available at http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2010dxb/materials/.

Our presentation, containing the details of how the aforementioned kernel / CSRSS vulns work and can be exploited, can be found here (1.27MB).

I am not going to spoil anything more here - if you were not lucky to attend the Dubai conference, I strongly recommend the polish CONFidence 2010 held in May (which I also mentioned already).

Have fun! ;-)

19Apr/103

CTcpFwd – cross-platform stdin/out to socket forwarding class

Hello,

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure to take part in a  local 24-hour long, programming marathon (greets to my team: Pawel and Wojtek!). Due to the nature of the competition, I was obliged to create a simple class, making it possible to redirect sockets to standard i/o (stdin / stdout), which would greatly facilitate the communication process with the contest server. Because of the fact that we were going to work on different system platforms - both Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux, the class had to be as cross-platform compatible as it was only possible. And so the CTcpFwd class, presented today, came into existence.