(Collaborative post by Mateusz “j00ru” Jurczyk and Gynvael Coldwind)
Two weeks ago (we’re running late, sorry!) Gynvael and I had the pleasure to attend one of the largest, most technical and renowned conferences in existence – Black Hat 2013 in Las Vegas, USA. The event definitely stood up to our expectations – the city was purely awesome (especially for someone who just turned 21 like me), the venue was at least as great, we saw many interesting and truly inspiring talks and a whole bunch of old friends, not to mention meeting a fair number of new folks. In addition to all this, our visit to Vegas turned out quite successful for other reasons too – our “Identifying and Exploiting Windows Kernel Race Conditions via Memory Access Patterns” work was nominated and eventually awarded a Pwnie (in fact, two mascots) in the “Most Innovative Research” category. Woot!
While the subject of memory access pattern analysis or the more general kernel instrumentation was only mentioned briefly when we originally released the first slide deck and whitepaper, as we mostly focused on the exploitation of constrained local kernel race conditions back then, our most recent Black Hat “Bochspwn: Identifying 0-days via System-Wide Memory Access Pattern Analysis” talk discussed the specifics of how the control flow of different operating systems’ kernels can be logged, examined or changed for the purpose of identifying various types of local vulnerabilities. Demos were presented live and are not available publicly (especially considering that one of them was a 0-day).
Slides: “Bochspwn: Identifying 0-days via System-Wide Memory Access Pattern Analysis” (5.26MB, PDF)