Microsoft Ring0 Vulnerability++
Pedram Amini (pedram) <pedramaminigmailcom> Tuesday, July 11 2006 17:26.59 CDT


Just publicly released an advisory affecting the Microsoft Windows kernel: Microsoft SRV.SYS Mailslot Ring0 Memory Corruption Vulnerability. I worked with H D Moore (who you most recently heard of from his Browser Fun blog) in discovering this bug. This is a great example of the benefits of having a custom SMB stack, many thanks to HD for sacrificing his Sunday afternoon with me on this.

The kernel memory corruption is obviously interesting as it allows for ring0 code execution. However, I find the following actual attack vector to be more interesting. According to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) documentation, Mailslot communications are divided into two classes. First-class Mailslots are connection oriented and operate over SMB/TCP. Second-class Mailslots provide connectionless messaging for broadcast messages and operate over SMB/UDP. Second-class Mailslots are limited to 424 bytes per message. First-class Mailslots are officially unsupported in the Windows 2000, XP and 2003 operating systems. This is the key point as it means that any code relying on the implicit message size limitation could be exposing a vulnerability. So add mailslots to your list of interfaces to enumerate and examine when auditing a target. Look for calls to the CreateMailSlot API, example:

    push 0          ; lpSecurityAttributes
    push 0          ; lReadTimeout
    push 0          ; nMaxMessageSize
    push slot_name  ; "\\\\.\\mailslot\\mailslot_name"
    call CreateMailslotA

The nMaxMessageSize argument is key as it specifies the maximum size of a single message that can be written to the Mailslot in bytes, a value of zero allows for any arbitrary size (this is what you want). So the big question is, what else is exposed? I know of at least one 3rd party application, details of which will be released when a patch is available. A combination of Googling and examinaton of a number of targets tells me that Mailslot usage is pretty rare (fortunate or unfortunate depending on your point of view), but I'm curious to see what the masses discover.

Comments
airhello Posted: Wednesday, December 19 2007 20:27.28 CST
can u tell me something about the first-class mailslot attack??
my email is [email protected]

thank u very much!