New Vista Attack to be Unveiled at Black Hat Conference
The Black Hat Security Conference is underway in Las Vegas and in addition to the well publicized DNS exploit, there’s another presentation raising some eyebrows. Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems and Alexander Sotirov of VMware, claim to have a way of completely bypassing all the much-hyped memory safeguards of Windows Vista, rendering the system vulnerable to the whims of an attacker.
Details are thin at this point, but NeoWin reports that the pair “were able to load whatever content they wanted into any location they wished on a user’s machine using a variety of scripting languages, such as Java, ActiveX and even .NET objects.”
The paper hasn’t been presented yet, but Mike Reavey, group manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center, tells NeoWin that the company has been aware of the research and will take a closer look once it has been made public.
For details you’ll have to wait until Dowd and Sotirov give their talk (entitled “How To Impress Girls With Browser Memory Protection Bypasses”)
We will demonstrate how the inherent design limitations of the protection mechanisms in Windows Vista make them ineffective for preventing the exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities in browsers and other client applications.
Other researchers believe that the style of attack may work just as well against other platforms and that patching the problem may prove difficult. The problem lies in the fact that these attacks don’t rely on any one specific vulnerability; they simply sidestep much of Vista’s protections.
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