In the Wild

2 Articles

This Week In Security: Scamming The FBI, In The Wild, And AI Security

December 16, 2022 by 16 Comments

If you’re part of a government alphabet agency, particularly running a program to share information to fight cybercrime, make sure to properly verify the identity of new members before admission. Oh, and make sure the API is rate-limited so a malicious member can’t scrape the entire user database and sell it on a dark web forum.

Putting snark aside, this is exactly what has happened to the FBI’s InfraGuard program. A clever user applied to the program using a CEO’s name and phone number, and a convincing-looking email address. The program administrators didn’t do much due diligence, and approved the application. Awkward.

BSD Ping

First off, the good folks at FreeBSD have published some errata about the ping problem we talked about last week. First off, note that while ping does elevate to root privileges via setuid, those privileges are dropped before any data handling occurs. And ping on FreeBSD runs inside a Capsicum sandbox, a huge obstacle to system compromise from within ping. And finally, further examination of the bug in a real-world context casts doubt on the idea that Remote Code Execution (RCE) is actually possible due to stack layouts.

If someone messes up somewhere, go look if you messed up in the same or similar way somewhere else.

Sage advice from [Florian Obser], OpenBSD developer. So seeing the ping problem in FreeBSD, he set about checking the OpenBSD ping implementation for identical or similar problems. The vulnerable code isn’t shared between the versions, so he reached for afl++, a fuzzing tool with an impressive list of finds. Connect afl++ to the function in ping that handles incoming data, and see what shakes out. The conclusion? No crashes found in this particular effort, but several hangs were identified and fixed. And that is a win. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Scamming The FBI, In The Wild, And AI Security” →

This Week In Security: In The Wild, Through Your NAT, And Brave

November 6, 2020 by 12 Comments

Most of the stories from this week are vulnerabilities dropped before fixes are available, many of them actively being exploited. Strap yourselves in!

Windows Kernel Crypto

The first is CVE-2020-17087, an issue in the Windows Kernel Cryptography Driver. The vulnerable system calls are accessible from unprivileged user-space, and potentially even from inside sandboxed environments. The resulting buffer overflow can result in arbitrary code executing in the kernel context, meaning this is a quick jump to root-level control over a victim system.

What exactly is the code flaw here that’s being attacked? It’s in a bit of buffer allocation logic, inside a binary-to-hex conversion routine. The function accepts an unsigned short length argument. That value is used to calculate the output buffer size, by multiplying it by six, and using an unsigned short to hold that value. See the problem? A sufficiently large value will roll over, and the output buffer size will be too small. It’s a value overflow that leads to a buffer overflow.

Because the problem is being actively exploited, the report has been made public just seven days after discovery. The flaw is still unpatched in Windows 10, as of the time of writing. It also seems to be present as far back as Windows 7, which will likely not receive a fix, being out of support. [Editor’s snarky note: Thanks, closed-source software.] Continue reading “This Week In Security: In The Wild, Through Your NAT, And Brave” →