Javocalypse

EDIT: Following its full disclosure Sun fixed Tavis' Java deployment toolkit bug (CVE-2010-0886 and CVE-2010-0887) in a matter of days, wow! No doubts this will be used in the future as an argument for full disclosure.
However, this does not bring much security! An attacker can still automatically downgrade your version of Java (using installJRE) and exploit this bug or any other he likes!

Almost one year ago, I blogged about one of my favorite security bug, found by Sami Koivu.

More specifically, I blogged about a class of Java bugs exposed by Sami Koivu and I mentioned this was the first instance of it.

Not only was it interesting from a technical perspective, but also high impact, allowing perfectly reliable (and relatively simple) cross platform exploitation of any system supporting Java applets (and that's a lot of systems). And this, through a widely deployed, but notoriously poorly updated component.

One year later [1], Sami strikes again. This time should be the final nail in Java applets' coffin for anyone with security expectations:

• Another instance of the privileged deserialization class of bugs (CVE-2010-0094)
• A new class of bugs: Java trusted method chaining. With one instance as a free sample (CVE-2010-0840). (This one is beautful by the way, be sure to read!)
• Free goodies for web security researchers: a flaw that completely breaks the web security model. The "Java-SOP" security was done in the compiler, not the runtime (CVE-2010-0095). Normally this would translate to "really bad", but why would one need your cookies when one can have your computer?

But Tavis would not let Sami have his party alone and between two kernel bugs took a quick look at the Java deployment toolkit and found this embarrassingly trivially exploitable issue. It's not corrected yet. And it's exploitable even if you have Java disabled in IE or Firefox, you only need to have Java installed.

It's so simple that it was obvious that many people had found (and were exploiting) this one. And we've already had confirmation of this, which led Tavis to release his advisory with mitigation instructions before a patch was available. Read his advisory for interesting thoughts on disclosure.

So, dear reader, if you don't want to get owned multiple times:

• Disable Java in your web browsers
• Uninstall Java completely or follow Tavis' mitigation instructions on Windows

Updating Java does not work, Sami has already mentioned that he would be very surprised if there weren't 10 other cases of "Java trusted method chaining" bugs. There are probably other deserialization ones too.
And anyway, a lazy attacker can just silently downgrade his up-to date target to whatever vulnerable Java version he wants to exploit, using the aforementioned Java deployment toolkit. Really, it's a feature.

Moreover, not everyone can update Java. Let's see how long it takes for Apple to patch these ones this time. My bet is that up-to-date default MacOS X installations are going to be vulnerable for a while to even the publicly reported bugs.

This is Javocalypse.

[1] well technically, only a few months later, but it took 5 months before the public advisory. A delay that I would call "reasonable".

There's a party at Ring0, and you're invited

Tavis and I have just come back from CanSecWest. The title of our talk was "There's a party at Ring0, and you're invited".

We went through some of the bugs that we have worked on this past year and mentioned some of our thoughts on kernel security in general:

• We see an increasing attack surface, both locally and remotely (@font-face, webgl...)
• The recent focus on sandboxes (Chrome, Office) makes the kernel an even more interesting target
• Modern operating systems still generally lack facilities for discretionary privilege dropping or to reduce the kernel's attack surface (with the notable exception of SECCOMP on Linux)
• While most OS have some degree of userland memory corruption exploitation prevention, kernel exploitation prevention is immature. On Linux, PaX/grsecurity leads the effort and Microsoft added safe unlinking in the Windows 7 kernel.
  

If you're interested, you can download our slides here.

CVE-2010-0232: Microsoft Windows NT #GP Trap Handler Allows Users to Switch Kernel Stack

Two days ago, Tavis Ormandy has published one of the most interesting vulnerabilities I've seen so far.

It's one of those rare, but fascinating design-level errors dealing with low-level system internals. Its exploitation requires skills and ingenuity.

The vulnerability lies in Windows' support for Intel's hardware 8086 emulation support (virtual-8086, or VM86) and is believed to have been there since Windows NT 3.1 (1993!), making it 17 years old.

It uses two tricks that we have already published on this blog before, the #GP on pre-commit handling failure and the forging of cs:eip in VM86 mode.

This was intended to be mentioned in our talk at PacSec about virtualization this past November, but Tavis had agreed with Microsoft to postpone the release of this advisory.

Tavis was kind enough to write a blog post about it, you can read it below:

From Tavis Ormandy:

I've just published one of the most interesting bugs I've ever encountered, a simple authentication check in Windows NT that can incorrectly let users take control of the system. The bug exists in code hidden deep enough inside the kernel that it's gone unnoticed for as long as NT has existed.

If you've ever tried to run an MS-DOS or Win16 application on a modern NT machine, the chances are it worked. This is an impressive feat, these applications were written for a completely different execution environment and operating system, and yet still work today and run at almost native speed.

The secret that makes this possible behind the scenes is Virtual-8086 mode. Virtual-8086 mode is a hardware emulation facility built into all x86 processors since the i386, and allows modern operating systems to run 16-bit programs designed for real mode with very little overhead. These 16-bit programs run in a simulated real mode environment within a regular protected mode task, allowing them to co-exist in a modern multitasking environment.

Support for Virtual-8086 mode requires a monitor, the collective name for the software that handles any requests the program makes. These requests range from handling sensitive instructions to mapping low-level services onto system calls and are implemented partially in kernel mode and partially in user mode.

In Windows NT, the user mode component is called the NTVDM subsystem, and it interacts with the kernel via a native system service called NtVdmControl. NtVdmControl is unusual because it's authenticated, only authorised programs are permitted to access it, which is enforced using a special process flag called VdmAllowed which the kernel verifies is present before NtVdmControl will perform any action; if you don't have this flag, the kernel will always return STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED.

The bug we're talking about today involves how BIOS service calls are handled, which are a low level way of interacting with the system that's needed to support real-mode programs. The kernel implements BIOS service calls in two stages, the second stage begins when the interrupt handler for general protection faults (often shortened to #GP in technical documents) detects that the system has completed the first stage.

The details of how BIOS service calls are implemented are unimportant, what is important is that the two stages must be perfectly synchronised, if the kernel transitions to the second stage incorrectly, a hostile user can take advantage of this confusion to take control of the kernel and compromise the system. In theory, this shouldn't be a problem, Microsoft implemented a check that verifies that the trap occurred at a magic address (actually, a cs:eip pair) that unprivileged users can't reach.

The check seems reasonable at first, the hardware guarantees that unprivileged code can't arbitrarily make itself more privileged without a special request, and even if it could, only authorised programs are permitted to use NtVdmControl() anyway.

Unfortunately, it turns out these assumptions were wrong. The problem I noticed was that although unprivileged code cannot make itself more privileged arbitrarily, Virtual-8086 mode makes testing the privilege level of code more difficult because the segment registers lose their special meaning. This is because In protected mode, the segment registers (particularly ss and cs) can be used to test privilege level, however in Virtual-8086 mode they're used to create far pointers, which allow 16-bit programs to access the 20-bit real address space.

However, I still couldn't abuse this fact because NtVdmControl() can only be accessed by authorised programs, and there's no other way to request pathological operation on Virtual-8086 mode tasks. I was able to solve this problem by invoking the real NTVDM subsystem, and then loading my own code inside it using a combination of CreateRemoteThread(), VirtualAllocEx() and WriteProcessMemory().

Finally, I needed to find a way to force the kernel to transition to the vulnerable code while my process appeared to be privileged. My solution to this was to make the kernel fault when returning to user mode from kernel mode, thus creating the appearance of a legitimate trap for the fabricated execution context that I had installed. These steps all fit together perfectly, and can be used to convince the kernel to execute my code, giving me complete control of the system.

Conclusion

Could Microsoft have avoided this issue? It's difficult to imagine how, errors like this will generally elude fuzz testing (In order to observe any problem, a fuzzer would need to guess a 46-bit magic number, as well as setup an intricate process state, not to mention the VdmAllowed flag), and any static analysis would need an incredibly accurate model of the Intel architecture.

The code itself was probably resistant to manual audit, it's remained fairly static throughout the history of NT, and is likely considered forgotten lore even inside Microsoft. In cases like this, security researchers are sometimes in a better position than those with the benefit of documentation and source code, all abstraction is stripped away and we can study what remains without being tainted by how documentation claims something is supposed to work.

If you want to mitigate future problems like this, reducing attack surface is always the key to security. In this particular case, you can use group policy to disable support for Application Compatibility (see the Application Compatability policy template) which will prevent unprivileged users from accessing NtVdmControl(), certainly a wise move if your users don't need MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 applications.