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2024-04-18 09:46:51 | The Windows Registry Adventure # 2: Une brève histoire de la fonctionnalité The Windows Registry Adventure #2: A brief history of the feature (lien direct) |
Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk, Google Project Zero Before diving into the low-level security aspects of the registry, it is important to understand its role in the operating system and a bit of history behind it. In essence, the registry is a hierarchical database made of named "keys" and "values", used by Windows and applications to store a variety of settings and configuration data. It is represented by a tree structure, in which keys may have one or more sub-keys, and every subkey is associated with exactly one parent key. Furthermore, every key may also contain one or more values, which have a type (integer, string, binary blob etc.) and are used to store actual data in the registry. Every key can be uniquely identified by its name and the names of all of its ascendants separated by the special backslash character (\'\\'), and starting with the name of one of the top-level keys (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, HKEY_USERS, etc.). For example, a full registry path may look like this: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows. At a high level, this closely resembles the structure of a file system, where the top-level key is equivalent to the root of a mounted disk partition (e.g. C:\), keys are equivalent to directories, and values are equivalent to files. One important distinction, however, is that keys are the only type of securable objects in the registry, and values play a much lesser role in the database than files do in the file system. Furthermore, specific subtrees of the registry are stored on disk in binary files called registry hives, and the hive mount points don\'t necessarily correspond one-to-one to the top-level keys (e.g. the C:\Windows\system32\config\SOFTWARE hive is mounted under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software, a one-level nested key). Fundamentally, there are only a few basic operations that can be performed in the registry. These operations are summarized in the table below: Hives Load hive Unload hive Flush hive to disk Keys Open key Create key Delete key | Tool Prediction Technical | ★★★★ | |
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2023-01-12 08:59:29 | DER Entitlements: The (Brief) Return of the Psychic Paper (lien direct) | Posted by Ivan Fratric, Project Zero Note: The vulnerability discussed here, CVE-2022-42855, was fixed in iOS 15.7.2 and macOS Monterey 12.6.2. While the vulnerability did not appear to be exploitable on iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, iOS 16.2 and macOS Ventura 13.1 nevertheless shipped hardening changes related to it. Last year, I spent a lot of time researching the security of applications built on top of XMPP, an instant messaging protocol based on XML. More specifically, my research focused on how subtle quirks in XML parsing can be used to undermine the security of such applications. (If you are interested in learning more about that research, I did a talk on it at Black Hat USA 2022. The slides and the recording can be found here and here). At some point, when a part of my research was published, people pointed out other examples (unrelated to XMPP) where quirks in XML parsing led to security vulnerabilities. One of those examples was a vulnerability dubbed Psychic Paper, a really neat vulnerability in the way Apple operating system checks what entitlements an application has. Entitlements are one of the core security concepts of Apple’s operating systems. As Apple’s documentation explains, “An entitlement is a right or privilege that grants an executable particular capabilities.” For example, an application on an Apple operating system can’t debug another application without possessing proper entitlements, even if those two applications run as the same user. Even applications running as root can’t perform all actions (such as accessing some of the kernel APIs) without appropriate entitlements. Psychic Paper was a vulnerability in the way entitlements were checked. Entitlements were stored inside the application’s signature blob in the XML format, so naturally the operating system needed to parse those at some point using an XML parser. The problem was that the OS didn’t have a single parser for this, but rather a staggering four parsers that were used in different places in the operating system. One parser was used for the initial check that the application only has permitted entitlements, and a different parser was later used when checking whether the application has an entitlement to perform a specific action. | Vulnerability Guideline Prediction | ★★★ |
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