Research
Zero Day Engineering
Discussion: Fuzzing from First Principles
On September 14, 2024, I had the pleasure of participating in the Off By One Security Podcast by SANS, discussing "Fuzzing from First Principles". In this follow-up article, I’ll tackle some interesting questions and comments from the livestream chat that didn’t make it into the live Q&A due to time constraints.
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Architecting Exploits: The VM Escape That Split the Field
In April 2021, I participated in the Pwn2Own Vancouver competition as an independent solo entrant and successfully demonstrated a zero-day virtual machine escape against the Parallels hypervisor. This post documents the event, releases the exploit source code, and provides a full technical walkthrough video. But more importantly, it seals the historical record.
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Google Chrome WebRTC 0-Day Vulnerability (CVE-2023-7024)
Quick analysis and research insights for the recently reported RCE vulnerability in Chromium WebRTC code and embedders.
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Deep Dive: Qualcomm MSM & ARM Mali Kernel 0-day Exploit Attacks of October 2023
This deep technical note briefly covers five kernel vulnerabilities in Qualcomm chipsets & ARM Mali GPU, which landed on CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog between October and December 2023.
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Google Chrome Skia Vulnerability Insights (CVE-2023-6345)
We analyzed the security patches of a recently disclosed Chrome 0-day attack to derive additional information about the vulnerability, and clarify practical threat impact.
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JavaScript Engines Exploitation: a Jscript9 Case Study
A brief writeup for the exploit that I wrote for a JavaScript JIT Type Confusion vulnerability in Jscript9.dll (2017). In the exploit I show one classical technique of JavaScript engines exploitation with a fully dynamic ASLR bypass, plus state-of-the-art process continuation to avoid crash. Full exploit code is included.
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Advanced Exploitation of Simple Bugs: a Parallels Desktop Case Study (Pwn2Own 2021)
At Pwn2Own Vancouver 2021 I have demonstrated an 0day VM escape exploit for Parallels Desktop hypervisor. The exploit chain that I developed was based on logic issues. In this deep technical presentation I share the technical details of the exploit, as well as various preliminary and contextual knowledge related to it. (Slides)
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From Binary Patch to Proof-of-concept: a VMware ESXi vmxnet3 Case Study
How to recover a complex vulnerability details from a binary security patch and create a proof of concept. A case study of VMware ESXi vmxnet3 Uninitialized Variable (CVE-2018-6981).
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Don't Share Your $HOME with Untrusted Guests
A story of a trivial *no-bug, by-design* guest-to-host VM escape on latest Parallels Desktop for Mac with bonus persistence, as enabled by the software vendor's product design decisions and certain properties of the Unix interactive shells.
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Microsoft Hyper-V Virtual Network Switch Out of Bounds Read
Deep technical analysis of a security bug in Microsoft Hyper-V root partition kernel component, discovered by me.
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Hyper-V System Internals & Linux Integrations Services Drivers
This research note documents some core internals of Microsoft Hyper-V through the implementation perspective of the official Hyper-V paravirtualization drivers package for Linux virtual machines: the LIS.
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