CVE-2020-0986

An elevation of privilege vulnerability exists when the Windows kernel fails to properly handle objects in memory, aka ‘Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability’. This CVE ID is unique from CVE-2020-1237, CVE-2020-1246, CVE-2020-1262, CVE-2020-1264, CVE-2020-1266, CVE-2020-1269, CVE-2020-1273, CVE-2020-1274, CVE-2020-1275, CVE-2020-1276, CVE-2020-1307, CVE-2020-1316.

Recent assessments:

ccondon-r7 at December 28, 2020 5:15pm UTC reported:

Google Project Zero researcher Maddie Stone, who originally disclosed this vulnerability to Microsoft, reported on December 23, 2020 that the patch is incomplete and can be bypassed.

Quoting her post here: “The original issue was an arbitrary pointer dereference which allowed the attacker to control the src and dest pointers to a memcpy. The “fix” simply changed the pointers to offsets, which still allows control of the args to the memcpy.”

Stealing directly from a conversation with Metasploit’s Windows exploit expert @zeroSteiner, it sounds like this bug isn’t terribly useful as an LPE “because the slpwow64 process doesn’t run with elevated privileges—just an elevated integrity, which Microsoft doesn’t consider a security boundary anymore anyway.” Project Zero-reported vulns tend to draw media and researcher attention and there’s quite a lot of detail publicly available between Stone’s original report and this in-depth Kaspersky write-up, so we may see more exploitation even if the impact of the bug by itself isn’t terribly high. That said, the Kaspersky analysis is definitely worth a read if you want to understand this CVE’s utility for the IE 11 use case!

gwillcox-r7 at November 22, 2020 2:32am UTC reported:

Google Project Zero researcher Maddie Stone, who originally disclosed this vulnerability to Microsoft, reported on December 23, 2020 that the patch is incomplete and can be bypassed.

Quoting her post here: “The original issue was an arbitrary pointer dereference which allowed the attacker to control the src and dest pointers to a memcpy. The “fix” simply changed the pointers to offsets, which still allows control of the args to the memcpy.”

Stealing directly from a conversation with Metasploit’s Windows exploit expert @zeroSteiner, it sounds like this bug isn’t terribly useful as an LPE “because the slpwow64 process doesn’t run with elevated privileges—just an elevated integrity, which Microsoft doesn’t consider a security boundary anymore anyway.” Project Zero-reported vulns tend to draw media and researcher attention and there’s quite a lot of detail publicly available between Stone’s original report and this in-depth Kaspersky write-up, so we may see more exploitation even if the impact of the bug by itself isn’t terribly high. That said, the Kaspersky analysis is definitely worth a read if you want to understand this CVE’s utility for the IE 11 use case!

Assessed Attacker Value: 2
Assessed Attacker Value: 2Assessed Attacker Value: 4