Exploiting .NET Managed DCOM

Posted by James Forshaw, Project Zero One of the more interesting classes of security vulnerabilities are those affecting interoperability technology. This is because these vulnerabilities typically affect any application using the technology, regardless of what the application actually does. Als...

(^Exploiting)\s*(CVE-2015-0318)\s*(in)\s*(Flash$)

Posted by Mark Brand, Irregular Expressionist So; issue 199/PSIRT-3161/CVE-2015-0318. Quick summary - it’s a bug in the PCRE regex engine as used in Flash. Note that the published version of the avmplus code is significantly out of date; there are a number of other vulnerabilities present that ha...

The poisoned NUL byte, 2014 edition

Posted by Chris Evans, Exploit Writer Underling to Tavis Ormandy Back in this 1998 post to the Bugtraq mailing list, Olaf Kirch outlined an attack he called “The poisoned NUL byte”. It was an off-by-one error leading to writing a NUL byte outside the bounds of the current stack frame. On i386...

Exploiting Android Messengers with WebRTC: Part 1

Posted by Natalie Silvanovich, Project Zero This is a three-part series on exploiting messenger applications using vulnerabilities in WebRTC. This series highlights what can go wrong when applications don't apply WebRTC patches and when the communication and notification of security issues breaks...

A day^W^W Several months in the life of Project Zero - Part 2: The Chrome exploit of suffering

Posted by Sergei Glazunov and Mark Brand, Project Zero Introduction After we’d understood how the bug worked, and had passed on those details to Chrome to help them get started on a fix, we went back to our other projects. This bug remained a topic of discussion, and eventually we ran out of...

KTRW: The journey to build a debuggable iPhone

Posted by Brandon Azad, Project Zero In my role here at Project Zero, I do not use some of the tooling used by some external iOS security researchers, in particular development-fused iPhones with hardware debugging capabilities like JTAG enabled. I believe that access to such devices puts those w...

Race you to the kernel!

Posted by Ian Beer of Google Project Zero The OS X and iOS kernel code responsible for loading a setuid root binary invalidates the old task port after first swapping the new virtual memory map pointer into the old task object, leaving a short race window where you can manipulate the memory of an...

Injecting Code into Windows Protected Processes using COM - Part 2

Posted by James Forshaw, Project Zero In my previous blog I discussed a technique which combined numerous issues I’ve previously reported to Microsoft to inject arbitrary code into a PPL-WindowsTCB process. The techniques presented don’t work for exploiting the older, stronger Protected Processes...

A Token’s Tale

Posted by James Forshaw currently impersonating NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM. Much as I enjoy the process of vulnerability research sometimes there’s a significant disparity between the difficulty of finding a vulnerability and exploiting it. The Project Zero blog contains numerous examples of complex...

More Mac OS X and iPhone sandbox escapes and kernel bugs

Posted by Ian Beer A couple of weeks ago Apple released OS X 10.9.5 and iOS 8 which fixed a number of sandbox escapes and privilege escalation bugs found by Project Zero. All-bar-one of these bugs were found via manual source code auditing where there was source and binary analysis where there...

What does a pointer look like, anyway?

Posted by Chris Evans, Renderer of Modern Art In Adobe’s August 2014 Flash Player security update, we see: These updates resolve memory leakage vulnerabilities that could be used to bypass memory address randomization CVE-2014-0540, CVE-2014-0542, CVE-2014-0543, CVE-2014-0544, CVE-2014-0545. I...

First handset with MTE on the market

By Mark Brand, Google Project Zero Introduction It's finally time for me to fulfill a long-standing promise. Since I first heard about ARM's Memory Tagging Extensions, I've said to far too many people at this point to be able to back out… that I'd immediately switch to the first available device...

The State of State Machines

Posted by Natalie Silvanovich, Project Zero On January 29, 2019, a serious vulnerability was discovered in Group FaceTime which allowed an attacker to call a target and force the call to connect without user interaction from the target, allowing the attacker to listen to the target’s surroundings...

MMS Exploit Part 4: MMS Primer, Completing the ASLR Oracle

Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk, Project Zero This post is the fourth of a multi-part series capturing my journey from discovering a vulnerable little-known Samsung image codec, to completing a remote zero-click MMS attack that worked on the latest Samsung flagship devices. New posts will be published ...

Owning Internet Printing - A Case Study in Modern Software Exploitation

Guest posted by Neel Mehta [email protected] - June 19th, 2015 Abstract Modern exploit mitigations draw attackers into a game of diminishing marginal returns. With each additional mitigation added, a subset of software bugs become unexploitable, and others become difficult to exploit, requiring...

Searching statically-linked vulnerable library functions in executable code

Helping researchers find 0ld days Posted by Thomas Dullien, Project Zero Executive summary Software supply chains are increasingly complicated, and it can be hard to detect statically-linked copies of vulnerable third-party libraries in executables. This blog post discusses the technical details ...

One Perfect Bug: Exploiting Type Confusion in Flash

Posted by Natalie Silvanovich, Dazed and Type Confused For some attackers, it is important that an exploit be extremely reliable. That is to say, the exploit should consistently lead to code execution when it is run on a system with a known platform and Flash version. One way to create such an...

Did the “Man With No Name” Feel Insecure?

Posted by James Forshaw, Taker of Names Sometimes when I'm doing security research I'll come across a bug which surprises me. I discovered just such a bug in the Windows version of Chrome which exposed a little-known security detail in the OS. The bug, CVE-2014-3196 was fixed in M38, so it seemed...

How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less

By Brandon Azad, Project Zero At 3 PM PDT on May 23, 2020, the unc0ver jailbreak was released for iOS 13.5 the latest signed version at the time of release using a zero-day vulnerability and heavy obfuscation. By 7 PM, I had identified the vulnerability and informed Apple. By 1 AM, I had sent App...

365 Days Later: Finding and Exploiting Safari Bugs using Publicly Available Tools

Posted by Ivan Fratric, Google Project Zero Around a year ago, we published the results of research about the resilience of modern browsers against DOM fuzzing, a well-known technique for finding browser bugs. Together with the bug statistics we also published Domato, our DOM fuzzing tool that wa...

Exploiting null-dereferences in the Linux kernel

Posted by Seth Jenkins, Project Zero For a fair amount of time, null-deref bugs were a highly exploitable kernel bug class. Back when the kernel was able to access userland memory without restriction, and userland programs were still able to map the zero page, there were many easy techniques for...

Examining Pointer Authentication on the iPhone XS

Posted by Brandon Azad, Project Zero In this post I examine Apple's implementation of Pointer Authentication on the A12 SoC used in the iPhone XS, with a focus on how Apple has improved over the ARM standard. I then demonstrate a way to use an arbitrary kernel read/write primitive to forge kernel...

MTE As Implemented, Part 2: Mitigation Case Studies

By Mark Brand, Project Zero Background In 2018, in the v8.5a version of the ARM architecture, ARM proposed a hardware implementation of tagged memory, referred to as MTE Memory Tagging Extensions. In Part 1 we discussed testing the technical and implementation limitations of MTE on the hardware...

Announcing the Fuzzilli Research Grant Program

Posted by Samuel Groß, Project Zero Project Zero’s mission is to make 0-day hard in order to improve end-user security. We attack this problem in different ways, including supporting other security researchers. While Google currently offers research grants, they are limited to academics and those...

Adventures in vulnerability reporting

Posted by Natalie Silvanovich, Project Zero At Project Zero, we spend a lot of time reporting security bugs to vendors. Most of the time, this is a fairly straightforward process, but we occasionally encounter challenges getting information about vulnerabilities into the hands of vendors. Since i...

Over The Air - Vol. 2, Pt. 3: Exploiting The Wi-Fi Stack on Apple Devices

Posted by Gal Beniamini, Project Zero In this blog post we’ll complete our goal of achieving remote kernel code execution on the iPhone 7, by means of Wi-Fi communication alone. After developing a Wi-Fi firmware exploit in the previous blog post, we are left with the task of using our newly...

Effective Fuzzing: A Dav1d Case Study

Guest post by Nick Galloway, Senior Security Engineer, 20% time on Project Zero Late in 2023, while working on a 20% project with Project Zero, I found an integer overflow in the dav1d AV1 video decoder. That integer overflow leads to an out-of-bounds write to memory. Dav1d 1.4.0 patched this, an...

task_t considered harmful

Posted by Ian Beer, Project Zero This post discusses a design issue at the core of the XNU kernel which powers iOS and MacOS. Apple have shipped two iterations of mitigations followed yesterday by a large refactor in MacOS 10.12.1/iOS 10.1. We’ll look at the bugs, how they can be exploited to...

OATmeal on the Universal Cereal Bus: Exploiting Android phones over USB

Posted by Jann Horn, Google Project Zero Recently, there has been some attention around the topic of physical attacks on smartphones, where an attacker with the ability to connect USB devices to a locked phone attempts to gain access to the data stored on the device. This blogpost describes how...

How to Compromise the Enterprise Endpoint

Posted by Tavis Ormandy. Symantec is a popular vendor in the enterprise security market, their flagship product is Symantec Endpoint Protection. They sell various products using the same core engine in several markets, including a consumer version under the Norton brand. Today we’re publishing...

Significant Flash exploit mitigations are live in v18.0.0.209

Posted by Mark Brand and Chris Evans, isolators of heaps Whilst Project Zero has gained a reputation for vulnerability and exploitation research, that's not all that we do. One of the main reasons we perform this research is to provide data to defenders; and one of the things that defenders can d...

Exploiting CVE-2014-0556 in Flash

Posted by Chris Evans, Kidnapper of RIP A couple of weeks ago, Adobe released security bulletin APSB14-21, including 8 fixes for bugs reported by Project Zero. Full details of these bugs are now public in our bug tracker. Some of the more interesting ones are a double free in the RTMP protocol, o...

Welcome to the new Project Zero Blog

Posted by Natalie Silvanovich While on Project Zero, we aim for our research to be leading-edge, our blog design was … not so much. We welcome readers to our shiny new blog! For the occasion, we asked members of Project Zero to dust off old blog posts that never quite saw the light of day. And...

Breaking the Sound Barrier Part I: Fuzzing CoreAudio with Mach Messages

Guest post by Dillon Franke, Senior Security Engineer, 20% time on Project Zero Every second, highly-privileged MacOS system daemons accept and process hundreds of IPC messages. In some cases, these message handlers accept data from sandboxed or unprivileged processes. In this blog post, I’ll...

Policy and Disclosure: 2021 Edition

Posted by Tim Willis, Project Zero At Project Zero, we spend a lot of time discussing and evaluating vulnerability disclosure policies and their consequences for users, vendors, fellow security researchers, and software security norms of the broader industry. We aim to be a vulnerability research...

Windows Sandbox Attack Surface Analysis

Posted by James Forshaw, Quartermaster of Tools Analysing the attack surface of user-mode sandboxed applications is a good way to hunt for elevation of privilege vulnerabilities. Much of the task of enumerating the attack surface could be done manually, but that’s a very tedious and error prone...

Blasting Past Webp

An analysis of the NSO BLASTPASS iMessage exploit Posted by Ian Beer, Google Project Zero On September 7, 2023 Apple issued an out-of-band security update for iOS: Around the same time on September 7th 2023, Citizen Lab published a blog post linking the two CVEs fixed in iOS 16.6.1 to an "NSO Gro...

MTE As Implemented, Part 1: Implementation Testing

By Mark Brand, Project Zero Background In 2018, in the v8.5a version of the ARM architecture, ARM proposed a hardware implementation of tagged memory, referred to as MTE Memory Tagging Extensions. Through mid-2022 and early 2023, Project Zero had access to pre-production hardware implementing thi...

BitUnmap: Attacking Android Ashmem

Posted by Gal Beniamini, Project Zero The law of leaky abstractions states that “all non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky”. In this blog post we’ll explore the ashmem shared memory interface provided by Android and see how false assumptions about its internal operation can result i...

A 0-click exploit chain for the Pixel 9 Part 1: Decoding Dolby

Posted by Natalie Silvanovich Over the past few years, several AI-powered features have been added to mobile phones that allow users to better search and understand their messages. One effect of this change is increased 0-click attack surface, as efficient analysis often requires message media to...

Chrome OS exploit: one byte overflow and symlinks

The following article is an guest blog post from an external researcher i.e. the author is not a Project Zero or Google researcher. This post is about a Chrome OS exploit I reported to Chrome VRP in September. The Project Zero folks were nice to let me do a guest post about it, so here goes. The...

A 0-click exploit chain for the Pixel 9 Part 3: Where do we go from here?

Posted by Natalie Silvanovich While our previous two blog posts provided technical recommendations for increasing the effort required by attackers to develop 0-click exploit chains, our experience finding, reporting and exploiting these vulnerabilities highlighted some broader issues in the Andro...

MMS Exploit Part 2: Effective Fuzzing of the Qmage Codec

Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk, Project Zero This post is the second of a multi-part series capturing my journey from discovering a vulnerable little-known Samsung image codec, to completing a remote zero-click MMS attack that worked on the latest Samsung flagship devices. New posts will be published ...

A year of Windows kernel font fuzzing #2: the techniques

Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk of Google Project Zero In part 1 of the series see here, we discussed the motivation and outcomes of our year long fuzzing effort against the Windows kernel font engine, followed by an analysis of two bug collisions with Keen Team and Hacking Team that ensued as a result...

Windows Drivers are True’ly Tricky

Posted by James Forshaw, Driving for Bugs Auditing a product for security vulnerabilities can be a difficult challenge, and there’s no guarantee you’ll catch all vulnerabilities even when you do. This post describes an issue I identified in the Windows Driver code for Truecrypt, which has already...

One font vulnerability to rule them all #3: Windows 8.1 32-bit sandbox escape exploitation

Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk of Google Project Zero This is part 3 of the “One font vulnerability to rule them all” blog post series. In the previous posts, we introduced the “blend” PostScript operator vulnerability, discussed the Charstring primitives necessary to fully control the stack contents...

One font vulnerability to rule them all #2: Adobe Reader RCE exploitation

Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk of Google Project Zero This is part 2 of the “One font vulnerability to rule them all” blog post series. In part 1 “introducing the BLEND vulnerability”, we discussed how developments in the digital typography field in the last four decades shaped the various font format...

Bypassing Administrator Protection by Abusing UI Access

Posted by James Forshaw In my last blog post I introduced the new Windows feature, Administrator Protection and how it aimed to create a secure boundary for UAC where one didn’t exist. I described one of the ways I was able to bypass the feature before it was released. In total I found 9 bypasses...

The story of Adobe Reader symbols

Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk, Project Zero Modern day security analysis of client applications is often hindered by the inaccessibility of their source code and other aids such as debug symbols. As a result, it is necessary to perform completely black-box reverse engineering of the software, in orde...

Heap Feng Shader: Exploiting SwiftShader in Chrome

Posted by Mark Brand, Google Project Zero On the majority of systems, under normal conditions, SwiftShader will never be used by Chrome - it’s used as a fallback if you have a known-bad “blacklisted” graphics card or driver. However, Chrome can also decide at runtime that your graphics driver is...