Allow us to channel an early 2000s, sweating, hyperkinetic Steve Ballmer: exploits, exploits, exploits, exploits! Today's Black Hat Europe 2015 Briefing highlights are all about novel and sometimes devastating new attacks against systems of all kinds. Can they get you as pumped up as Steve? Let's find out.
This year's Pwn2Own competition switched the attack surface to Internet Explorer 64-bit. This meant stronger ASLR, negating simple heap-spraying techniques. But Yuki Chen and Linan Hao finally found a way in via two 0days, which they'll detail in Hey Man Have You Forgotten to Initialize Your Memory?. By going through the poc exploit they acheived ASLR & CFG bypass and remote code execution with a single uninitialized memory bug, and bypassed IE's EPM sandbox to achieve privilege elevation. Well played.
Despite the prevalence and high impact of command injection attacks, researchers have paid scant attention to this type of code injection, with no dedicated software that automatically detects and exploits command injection attacks. Commix: Detecting and Exploiting Command Injection Flaws will attempt to fill that gap by proposing an open-source tool that automates the process of detecting and exploiting command injection flaws on web applications. The new Commix (COMMand Injection eXploitation) tool can detect these vulnerabilities, and has already revealed several related 0days.
Macs used to be seen as something of a security refuge, but with the growing popularity of Apple products and operating systems paradise is under attack. Kernel exploit mitigations such as KASLR and SMEP have been overcome, and while "vm_map_copy" corruption has been mitigated in OSX 10.11 and iOS 9, Attacking the XNU Kernel in El Capitain will demonstrate new techniques to get around XNU's latest changes. One highlight: a real kernel exploit for the most recent version of El Capitain to bypass System Integrity Protection (rootless).
Finally, cloud providers use memory deduplication to increase the cost effectivness of virtual machines running on the same host. But the page faults caused by writing to these pages can be used by an attacker as a side-channel to detect whether a page has been shared. Silently Breaking ASLR in the Cloud will detail an attack that leverages this memory side-channel to leak the randomized base addresses of libraries and executables mapped in the processes of neighboring VMs, defeating ASLR.
Black Hat Europe 2015 takes place November 10-13 in Amsterdam. Did you register yet?