A very deep dive into iOS Exploit chains found in the wild

Posted by Ian Beer, Project Zero Project Zero’s mission is to make 0-day hard. We often work with other companies to find and report security vulnerabilities, with the ultimate goal of advocating for structural security improvements in popular systems to help protect people everywhere. Earlier th...

Using Kerberos for Authentication Relay Attacks

Posted by James Forshaw, Project Zero This blog post is a summary of some research I've been doing into relaying Kerberos authentication in Windows domain environments. To keep this blog shorter I am going to assume you have a working knowledge of Windows network authentication, and specifically...

Hunting for Bugs in Windows Mini-Filter Drivers

Posted by James Forshaw, Project Zero In December Microsoft fixed 4 issues in Windows in the Cloud Filter and Windows Overlay Filter WOF drivers CVE-2020-17103, CVE-2020-17134, CVE-2020-17136, CVE-2020-17139. These 4 issues were 3 local privilege escalations and a security feature bypass, and the...

In-the-Wild Series: Chrome Exploits

This is part 3 of a 6-part series detailing a set of vulnerabilities found by Project Zero being exploited in the wild. To read the other parts of the series, see the introduction post. Posted by Sergei Glazunov, Project Zero Introduction As we continue the series on the watering hole attack...

Designing sockfuzzer, a network syscall fuzzer for XNU

Posted by Ned Williamson, Project Zero Introduction When I started my 20% project – an initiative where employees are allocated twenty-percent of their paid work time to pursue personal projects – with Project Zero, I wanted to see if I could apply the techniques I had learned fuzzing Chrome to...

An iOS hacker tries Android

Written by Brandon Azad, when working at Project Zero One of the amazing aspects of working at Project Zero is having the flexibility to direct my own research agenda. My prior work has almost exclusively focused on iOS exploitation, but back in August, I thought it could be interesting to try...

2022 0-day In-the-Wild Exploitation…so far

Posted by Maddie Stone, Google Project Zero This blog post is an overview of a talk, “ 0-day In-the-Wild Exploitation in 2022…so far”, that I gave at the FIRST conference in June 2022. The slides are available here. For the last three years, we’ve published annual year-in-review reports of 0-days...

In-the-wild iOS Exploit Chain 1

Posted by Ian Beer, Project Zero TL;DR This exploit provides evidence that these exploit chains were likely written contemporaneously with their supported iOS versions; that is, the exploit techniques which were used suggest that this exploit was written around the time of iOS 10. This suggests...

The Fully Remote Attack Surface of the iPhone

Posted by Natalie Silvanovich, Project Zero While there have been several rumours and reports of fully remote vulnerabilities affecting the iPhone being used by attackers in the last couple of years, limited information is available about the technical details of these vulnerabilities, as well as...

The More You Know, The More You Know You Don’t Know

A Year in Review of 0-days Used In-the-Wild in 2021 Posted by Maddie Stone, Google Project Zero This is our third annual year in review of 0-days exploited in-the-wild 2020, 2019. Each year we’ve looked back at all of the detected and disclosed in-the-wild 0-days as a group and synthesized what w...

Déjà vu-lnerability

A Year in Review of 0-days Exploited In-The-Wild in 2020 Posted by Maddie Stone, Project Zero 2020 was a year full of 0-day exploits. Many of the Internet’s most popular browsers had their moment in the spotlight. Memory corruption is still the name of the game and how the vast majority of detect...

Exploiting Android Messengers with WebRTC: Part 2

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...

On VBScript

Posted by Ivan Fratric, Google Project Zero Introduction Vulnerabilities in the VBScript scripting engine are a well known way to attack Microsoft Windows. In order to reduce this attack surface, in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, Microsoft disabled VBScript execution in Internet Explorer in the...

JSC Exploits

Posted by Samuel Groß, Project Zero In this post, we will take a look at the WebKit exploits used to gain an initial foothold onto the iOS device and stage the privilege escalation exploits. All exploits here achieve shellcode execution inside the sandboxed renderer process WebContent on iOS...

Who Contains the Containers?

Posted by James Forshaw, Project Zero This is a short blog post about a research project I conducted on Windows Server Containers that resulted in four privilege escalations which Microsoft fixed in March 2021. In the post, I describe what led to this research, my research process, and insights...

Detection Deficit: A Year in Review of 0-days Used In-The-Wild in 2019

Posted by Maddie Stone, Project Zero In May 2019, Project Zero released our tracking spreadsheet for 0-days used “in the wild” and we started a more focused effort on analyzing and learning from these exploits. This is another way Project Zero is trying to make zero-day hard. This blog post...

In-the-Wild Series: Android Exploits

This is part 4 of a 6-part series detailing a set of vulnerabilities found by Project Zero being exploited in the wild. To read the other parts of the series, see the introduction post. Posted by Mark Brand, Project Zero A survey of the exploitation techniques used by a high-tier attacker against...

JITSploitation II: Getting Read/Write

Posted by Samuel Groß, Project Zero This three-part series highlights the technical challenges involved in finding and exploiting JavaScript engine vulnerabilities in modern web browsers and evaluates current exploit mitigation technologies. The exploited vulnerability, CVE-2020-9802, was fixed i...

In-the-Wild Series: Chrome Infinity Bug

This is part 2 of a 6-part series detailing a set of vulnerabilities found by Project Zero being exploited in the wild. To read the other parts of the series, see the introduction post. Posted by Sergei Glazunov, Project Zero This post only covers one of the exploits, specifically a renderer...

Remote iPhone Exploitation Part 3: From Memory Corruption to JavaScript and Back -- Gaining Code Execution

Posted by Samuel Groß, Project Zero This is the third and last post in a series about a remote, interactionless iPhone exploit over iMessage. The first blog post introduced the exploited vulnerability, and the second blog post described a way to perform a heapspray, leaking the shared cache base...

TFW you-get-really-excited-you-patch-diffed-a-0day-used-in-the-wild-but-then-find-out-it-is-the-wrong-vuln

Posted by Maddie Stone, Project Zero INTRODUCTION I’m really interested in 0-days exploited in the wild and what we, the security community, can learn about them to make 0-day hard. I explained some of Project Zero’s ideas and goals around in-the-wild 0-days in a November blog post. On December’s...

Multiple Internet to Baseband Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities in Exynos Modems

Posted by Tim Willis, Project Zero In late 2022 and early 2023, Project Zero reported eighteen 0-day vulnerabilities in Exynos Modems produced by Samsung Semiconductor. The four most severe of these eighteen vulnerabilities CVE-2023-24033, CVE-2023-26496, CVE-2023-26497 and CVE-2023-26498 allowed...

In-the-wild iOS Exploit Chain 3

Posted by Ian Beer, Project Zero TL;DR This chain targeted iOS 11-11.4.1, spanning almost 10 months. This is the first chain we observed which had a separate sandbox escape exploit. The sandbox escape vulnerability was a severe security regression in libxpc, where refactoring lead to a bounds che...

Exploiting the Linux kernel via packet sockets

Guest blog post, posted by Andrey Konovalov Introduction Lately I’ve been spending some time fuzzing network-related Linux kernel interfaces with syzkaller. Besides the recently discovered vulnerability in DCCP sockets, I also found another one, this time in packet sockets. This post describes ho...

An iOS zero-click radio proximity exploit odyssey

Posted by Ian Beer, Project Zero NOTE: This specific issue was fixed before the launch of Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing in iOS 13.5 in May 2020. In this demo I remotely trigger an unauthenticated kernel memory corruption vulnerability which causes all iOS devices in radio-proximity to reboot...

In-the-wild iOS Exploit Chain 2

Posted by Ian Beer, Project Zero TL;DR This was an exploit for a known bug class which I had been auditing for since late 2016. The same anti-pattern which lead to this vulnerability, we’ll see again in Exploit Chain 3, which follows this post. This exploit chain targets iOS 10.3 through 10.3.3...

Root Cause Analyses for 0-day In-the-Wild Exploits

Posted by Maddie Stone, Project Zero When a 0-day is exploited in the wild AND it is detected, we need to use that as an opportunity to learn as much as possible about the vulnerability and the exploit if we hope to make 0-day hard. One of the main methods to do that is to perform a root cause...

Introducing the In-the-Wild Series

This is part 1 of a 6-part series detailing a set of vulnerabilities found by Project Zero being exploited in the wild. To read the other parts of the series, head to the bottom of this post. At Project Zero we often refer to our goal simply as “make 0-day hard”. Members of the team approach this...

CVE-2021-30737, @xerub's 2021 iOS ASN.1 Vulnerability

Posted by Ian Beer, Google Project Zero This blog post is my analysis of a vulnerability found by @xerub. Phrack published @xerub's writeup so go check that out first. As well as doing my own vulnerability research I also spend time trying as best as I can to keep up with the public...

A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution

Posted by Ian Beer & Samuel Groß of Google Project Zero We want to thank Citizen Lab for sharing a sample of the FORCEDENTRY exploit with us, and Apple’s Security Engineering and Architecture SEAR group for collaborating with us on the technical analysis. The editorial opinions reflected below ar...

In-the-wild iOS Exploit Chain 5

Posted by Ian Beer, Project Zero TL;DR This exploit chain is a three way collision between this attacker group, Brandon Azad from Project Zero, and @S0rryMybad from 360 security. On November 17th 2018, @S0rryMybad used this vulnerability to win $200,000 USD at the TianFu Cup PWN competition...

In-the-Wild Series: Windows Exploits

This is part 6 of a 6-part series detailing a set of vulnerabilities found by Project Zero being exploited in the wild. To read the other parts of the series, see the introduction post. Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk and Sergei Glazunov, Project Zero In this post we'll discuss the exploits for...

In-the-Wild Series: October 2020 0-day discovery

Posted by Maddie Stone, Project Zero In October 2020, Google Project Zero discovered seven 0-day exploits being actively used in-the-wild. These exploits were delivered via "watering hole" attacks in a handful of websites pointing to two exploit servers that hosted exploit chains for Android,...

In-the-Wild Series: Android Post-Exploitation

This is part 5 of a 6-part series detailing a set of vulnerabilities found by Project Zero being exploited in the wild. To read the other parts of the series, see the introduction post. Posted by Maddie Stone, Project Zero A deep-dive into the implant used by a high-tier attacker against Android...

One font vulnerability to rule them all #1: Introducing the BLEND vulnerability

Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk of Google Project Zero Last month, I presented parts of my PostScript font security research at the REcon security conference in Montreal, in a talk titled “One font vulnerability to rule them all: A story of cross-software ownage, shared codebases and advanced...

The Windows Registry Adventure #1: Introduction and research results

Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk, Google Project Zero In the 20-month period between May 2022 and December 2023, I thoroughly audited the Windows Registry in search of local privilege escalation bugs. It all started unexpectedly: I was in the process of developing a coverage-based Windows kernel fuzzer...

Fuzzing Closed-Source JavaScript Engines with Coverage Feedback

Posted by Ivan Fratric, Project Zero tl;dr I combined Fuzzilli an open-source JavaScript engine fuzzer, with TinyInst an open-source dynamic instrumentation library for fuzzing. I also added grammar-based mutation support to Jackalope my black-box binary fuzzer. So far, these two approaches...

Windows Exploitation Tricks: Trapping Virtual Memory Access

Posted by James Forshaw, Project Zero This blog is a continuation of my series of Windows exploitation tricks. This one describes an exploitation trick I’ve been trying to develop for years, succeeding mostly, more on that later on the latest versions of Windows 10. It’s a trick to trap access to...

Bad Binder: Android In-The-Wild Exploit

Posted by Maddie Stone, Project Zero Introduction On October 3, 2019, we disclosed issue 1942 CVE-2019-2215, which is a use-after-free in Binder in the Android kernel. The bug is a local privilege escalation vulnerability that allows for a full compromise of a vulnerable device. If chained with a...

How a simple Linux kernel memory corruption bug can lead to complete system compromise

An analysis of current and potential kernel security mitigations Posted by Jann Horn, Project Zero Introduction This blog post describes a straightforward Linux kernel locking bug and how I exploited it against Debian Buster's 4.19.0-13-amd64 kernel. Based on that, it explores options for securit...

A cache invalidation bug in Linux memory management

Posted by Jann Horn, Google Project Zero This blogpost describes a way to exploit a Linux kernel bug CVE-2018-17182 that exists since kernel version 3.16. While the bug itself is in code that is reachable even from relatively strongly sandboxed contexts, this blogpost only describes a way to...

An EPYC escape: Case-study of a KVM breakout

Posted by Felix Wilhelm, Project Zero Introduction KVM for Kernel-based Virtual Machine is the de-facto standard hypervisor for Linux-based cloud environments. Outside of Azure, almost all large-scale cloud and hosting providers are running on top of KVM, turning it into one of the fundamental...

Windows Exploitation Tricks: Relaying DCOM Authentication

Posted by James Forshaw, Project Zero In my previous blog post I discussed the possibility of relaying Kerberos authentication from a DCOM connection. I was originally going to provide a more in-depth explanation of how that works, but as it's quite involved I thought it was worthy of its own blo...

Project Naptime: Evaluating Offensive Security Capabilities of Large Language Models

Posted by Sergei Glazunov and Mark Brand, Google Project Zero Introduction At Project Zero, we constantly seek to expand the scope and effectiveness of our vulnerability research. Though much of our work still relies on traditional methods like manual source code audits and reverse engineering,...

Windows Kernel Logic Bug Class: Access Mode Mismatch in IO Manager

Posted by James Forshaw, Project Zero This blog post is an in-depth look at an interesting logic bug class in the Windows Kernel and what I did to try to get it fixed with our partners at Microsoft. The maximum impact of the bug class is local privilege escalation if kernel and driver developers...

The Windows Registry Adventure #6: Kernel-mode objects

Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk, Google Project Zero Welcome back to the Windows Registry Adventure! In the previous installment of the series, we took a deep look into the internals of the regf hive format. Understanding this foundational aspect of the registry is crucial, as it illuminates the design...

Analyzing a Modern In-the-wild Android Exploit

By Seth Jenkins, Project Zero Introduction In December 2022, Google’s Threat Analysis Group TAG discovered an in-the-wild exploit chain targeting Samsung Android devices. TAG’s blog post covers the targeting and the actor behind the campaign. This is a technical analysis of the final stage of one...

This shouldn't have happened: A vulnerability postmortem

Posted by Tavis Ormandy, Project Zero Introduction This is an unusual blog post. I normally write posts to highlight some hidden attack surface or interesting complex vulnerability class. This time, I want to talk about a vulnerability that is neither of those things. The striking thing about thi...

JITSploitation III: Subverting Control Flow

Posted by Samuel Groß, Project Zero This three-part series highlights the technical challenges involved in finding and exploiting JavaScript engine vulnerabilities in modern web browsers and evaluates current exploit mitigation technologies. The exploited vulnerability, CVE-2020-9802, was fixed i...

Bypassing VirtualBox Process Hardening on Windows

Posted by James Forshaw, Project Zero Processes on Windows are securable objects, which prevents one user logged into a Windows machine from compromising another user’s processes. This is a pretty important security feature, at least from the perspective of a non-administrator user. The security...