Stagefright: an Android Exploitation Case Study
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Systematization of Vulnerability Discovery Knowledge: Review
Systematization of Vulnerability Discovery Knowledge Review Protocol Nuthan Munaiah and Andrew Meneely Department of Software Engineering Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester, NY 14623 {nm6061,axmvse}@rit.edu February 12, 2019 1 Introduction As more aspects of our daily lives depend on technology, the software that supports this technology must be secure. We, as users, almost subconsciously assume the software we use to always be available to serve our requests while preserving the confidentiality and integrity of our information. Unfortunately, incidents involving catastrophic software vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed (in OpenSSL), Stagefright (in Android), and EternalBlue (in Windows) have made abundantly clear that software, like other engineered creations, is prone to mistakes. Over the years, Software Engineering, as a discipline, has recognized the potential for engineers to make mistakes and has incorporated processes to prevent such mistakes from becoming exploitable vulnerabilities. Developers leverage a plethora of processes, techniques, and tools such as threat modeling, static and dynamic analyses, unit/integration/fuzz/penetration testing, and code reviews to engineer secure software. These practices, while effective at identifying vulnerabilities in software, are limited in their ability to describe the engineering failures that may have led to the introduction of vulnerabilities. Fortunately, as researchers propose empirically-validated metrics to characterize historical vulnerabilities, the factors that may have led to the introduction of vulnerabilities emerge. Developers must be made aware of these factors to help them proactively consider security implications of the code that they contribute. In other words, we want developers to think like an attacker (i.e. inculcate an attacker mindset) to proactively discover vulnerabilities. -
Heap Feng Shui in Javascript
Heap Feng Shui in JavaScript Alexander Sotirov <[email protected]> Introduction The exploitation of heap corruption vulnerabilities on the Windows platform has become increasingly more difficult since the introduction of XP SP2. Heap protection features such as safe unlinking and heap cookies have been successful in stopping most generic heap exploitation techniques. Methods for bypassing the heap protection exist, but they require a great degree of control over the allocation patterns of the vulnerable application. This paper introduces a new technique for precise manipulation of the browser heap layout using specific sequences of JavaScript allocations. We present a JavaScript library with functions for setting up the heap in a controlled state before triggering a heap corruption bug. This allows us to exploit very difficult heap corruption vulnerabilities with great reliability and precision. We will focus on Internet Explorer exploitation, but the general techniques presented here are potentially applicable to any other browser or scripting environment. Previous work The most widely used browser heap exploitation technique is the heap spraying method developed by SkyLined for his Internet Explorer IFRAME exploit. This technique uses JavaScript to create multiple strings containing a NOP slide and shellcode. The JavaScript runtime stores the data for each string in a new block on the heap. Heap allocations usually start at the beginning of the address space and go up. After allocating 200MB of memory for the strings, any address between 50MB and 200MB is very likely to point at the NOP slide. Overwriting a return address or a function pointer with an address in this range will lead to a jump to the NOP slide and shellcode execution. -
A Defense Against Heap-Spraying Code Injection Attacks
Nozzle: A Defense Against Heap-spraying Code Injection Attacks Paruj Ratanaworabhan Benjamin Livshits and Benjamin Zorn Cornell University Microsoft Research Ithaca, NY Redmond, WA November 19, 2008 Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2008-176 nnoozzllee 1 Abstract Heap spraying is a new security attack that significantly increases the exploitability of existing memory corruption errors in type-unsafe applications. With heap spraying, attackers leverage their ability to allocate arbitrary objects in the heap of a type-safe language, such as JavaScript, literally filling the heap with objects that contain danger- ous exploit code. In recent years, spraying has been used in many real security exploits, especially in web browsers. In this paper, we describe Nozzle, a runtime monitoring infrastructure that detects attempts by attackers to spray the heap. Nozzle uses lightweight emulation techniques to detect the presence of objects that contain executable code. To reduce false positives, we developed a notion of global “heap health”. We measure the effectiveness of Nozzle by demonstrating that it successfully detects 12 published and 2,000 synthetically generated heap-spraying exploits. We also show that even with a detection threshold set six times lower than is required to detect published ma- licious attacks, Nozzle reports no false positives when run over 150 popular Internet sites. Using sampling and concurrent scanning to re- duce overhead, we show that the performance overhead of Nozzle is less than 7% on average. While Nozzle currently targets heap-based spraying attacks, its techniques can be applied to a more general class of attacks in which an attacker attempts to fill the address space with dangerous code objects. -
Internet Security Threat Report VOLUME 21, APRIL 2016 TABLE of CONTENTS 2016 Internet Security Threat Report 2
Internet Security Threat Report VOLUME 21, APRIL 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS 2016 Internet Security Threat Report 2 CONTENTS 4 Introduction 21 Tech Support Scams Go Nuclear, 39 Infographic: A New Zero-Day Vulnerability Spreading Ransomware Discovered Every Week in 2015 5 Executive Summary 22 Malvertising 39 Infographic: A New Zero-Day Vulnerability Discovered Every Week in 2015 8 BIG NUMBERS 23 Cybersecurity Challenges For Website Owners 40 Spear Phishing 10 MOBILE DEVICES & THE 23 Put Your Money Where Your Mouse Is 43 Active Attack Groups in 2015 INTERNET OF THINGS 23 Websites Are Still Vulnerable to Attacks 44 Infographic: Attackers Target Both Large and Small Businesses 10 Smartphones Leading to Malware and Data Breaches and Mobile Devices 23 Moving to Stronger Authentication 45 Profiting from High-Level Corporate Attacks and the Butterfly Effect 10 One Phone Per Person 24 Accelerating to Always-On Encryption 45 Cybersecurity, Cybersabotage, and Coping 11 Cross-Over Threats 24 Reinforced Reassurance with Black Swan Events 11 Android Attacks Become More Stealthy 25 Websites Need to Become Harder to 46 Cybersabotage and 12 How Malicious Video Messages Could Attack the Threat of “Hybrid Warfare” Lead to Stagefright and Stagefright 2.0 25 SSL/TLS and The 46 Small Business and the Dirty Linen Attack Industry’s Response 13 Android Users under Fire with Phishing 47 Industrial Control Systems and Ransomware 25 The Evolution of Encryption Vulnerable to Attacks 13 Apple iOS Users Now More at Risk than 25 Strength in Numbers 47 Obscurity is No Defense -
Compromised Connections
COMPROMISED CONNECTIONS OVERCOMING PRIVACY CHALLENGES OF THE MOBILE INTERNET The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and many other international and regional treaties recognize privacy as a fundamental human right. Privacy A WORLD OF INFORMATION underpins key values such as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of speech, IN YOUR MOBILE PHONE and it is one of the most important, nuanced and complex fundamental rights of contemporary age. For those of us who care deeply about privacy, safety and security, not only for ourselves but also for our development partners and their missions, we need to think of mobile phones as primary computers As mobile phones have transformed from clunky handheld calling devices to nifty touch-screen rather than just calling devices. We need to keep in mind that, as the storage, functionality, and smartphones loaded with apps and supported by cloud access, the networks these phones rely on capability of mobiles increase, so do the risks to users. have become ubiquitous, ferrying vast amounts of data across invisible spectrums and reaching the Can we address these hidden costs to our digital connections? Fortunately, yes! We recommend: most remote corners of the world. • Adopting device, data, network and application safety measures From a technical point-of-view, today’s phones are actually more like compact mobile computers. They are packed with digital intelligence and capable of processing many of the tasks previously confined -
Jitdefender: a Defense Against JIT Spraying Attacks
JITDefender: A Defense against JIT Spraying Attacks Ping Chen, Yi Fang, Bing Mao, and Li Xie State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093 {chenping,fangyi,maobing,xieli}@nju.edu.cn Abstract. JIT spraying is a new code-reuse technique to attack virtual machines based on JIT (Just-in-time) compilation. It has proven to be capable of circum- venting the defenses such as data execution prevention (DEP) and address space layout randomization(ASLR), which are effective for preventing the traditional code injection attacks. In this paper, we describe JITDefender, an enhancement of standard JIT-based VMs, which can prevent the attacker from executing arbi- trary JIT compiled code on the VM. Thereby JITDefender can block JIT spraying attacks. We prove the effectiveness of JITDefender by demonstrating that it can successfully prevent existing JIT spraying exploits. JITDefender reports no false positives when run over benign actionscript/javascript programs. In addition, we show that the performance overhead of JITDefender is low. 1 Introduction In recent years, attackers have resorted to code-reuse techniques instead of injecting their own malicious code. Typical techniques are Return-oriented Programming (ROP) [21], BCR [12] and Inspector [11]. Different code-reuse attacks launch the attack based on different codebases, including the application, shared libraries or even the kernel. However, all the techniques need to find useful instruction sequence in the codebase, and the task is tedious and costly in practice. Recently, a new code-reuse attack named JIT (Just-In-Time) spraying was proposed by Blazakis [10]. -
Mind the Gap: Dissecting the Android Patch Gap | Ben Schlabs
Mind the Gap – Dissecting the Android patch gap Ben Schlabs <[email protected]> SRLabs Template v12 Corporate Design 2016 Allow us to take you on two intertwined journeys This talk in a nutshell § Wanted to understand how fully-maintained Android phones can be exploited Research § Found surprisingly large patch gaps for many Android vendors journey – some of these are already being closed § Also found Android exploitation to be unexpectedly difficult § Wanted to check thousands of firmwares for the presence of Das Logo Horizontal hundreds of patches — Pos / Neg Engineering § Developed and scaled a rather unique analysis method journey § Created an app for your own analysis 2 3 Android patching is a known-hard problem Patching challenges Patch ecosystems § Computer OS vendors regularly issue patches OS vendor § Users “only” have to confirm the installation of § Microsoft OS patches Patching is hard these patches § Apple Endpoints & severs to start with § Still, enterprises consider regular patching § Linux distro among the most effortful security tasks § “The moBile ecosystem’s diversity […] OS Chipset Phone Android contriButes to security update complexity and vendor vendor vendor phones inconsistency.” – FTC report, March 2018 [1] The nature of Telco § Das Logo HorizontalAndroid makes Patches are handed down a long chain of — Pos / Negpatching so typically four parties Before reaching the user much more § Only some devices get patched (2016: 17% [2]). difficult We focus our research on these “fully patched” phones Our research question – -
Automating Patching of Vulnerable Open-Source Software Versions in Application Binaries
Automating Patching of Vulnerable Open-Source Software Versions in Application Binaries Ruian Duan:, Ashish Bijlani:, Yang Ji:, Omar Alrawi:, Yiyuan Xiong˚, Moses Ike:, Brendan Saltaformaggio,: and Wenke Lee: fruian, ashish.bijlani, yang.ji, alrawi, [email protected], [email protected] [email protected], [email protected] : Georgia Institute of Technology, ˚ Peking University Abstract—Mobile application developers rely heavily on open- while ensuring backward compatibility, and test for unin- source software (OSS) to offload common functionalities such tended side-effects. For the Android platform, Google has as the implementation of protocols and media format playback. initiated the App Security Improvement Program (ASIP) [21] Over the past years, several vulnerabilities have been found in to notify developers of vulnerable third-party libraries in popular open-source libraries like OpenSSL and FFmpeg. Mobile use. Unfortunately, many developers, as OSSPolice [15] and applications that include such libraries inherit these flaws, which LibScout [4] show, do not update or patch their application, make them vulnerable. Fortunately, the open-source community is responsive and patches are made available within days. However, which leaves end-users exposed. Android developers mainly mobile application developers are often left unaware of these use Java and C/C++ [1] libraries. While Derr et al. [14] flaws. The App Security Improvement Program (ASIP) isa show that vulnerable Java libraries can be fixed by library- commendable effort by Google to notify application developers level update, their C/C++ counterparts, which contain many of these flaws, but recent work has shown that many developers more documented security bugs in the National Vulnerability do not act on this information. -
VULNERABLE by DESIGN: MITIGATING DESIGN FLAWS in HARDWARE and SOFTWARE Konoth, R.K
VU Research Portal VULNERABLE BY DESIGN: MITIGATING DESIGN FLAWS IN HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE Konoth, R.K. 2020 document version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication in VU Research Portal citation for published version (APA) Konoth, R. K. (2020). VULNERABLE BY DESIGN: MITIGATING DESIGN FLAWS IN HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. E-mail address: [email protected] Download date: 07. Oct. 2021 VULNERABLE BY DESIGN: MITIGATING DESIGN FLAWS IN HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE PH.D. THESIS RADHESH KRISHNAN KONOTH VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT AMSTERDAM, 2020 Faculty of Science The research reported in this dissertation was conducted at the Faculty of Science — at the Department of Computer Science — of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam This work was supported by the MALPAY consortium, consisting of the Dutch national police, ING, ABN AMRO, Rabobank, Fox-IT, and TNO. -
Fighting the War in Memory
Fighting the War in Memory Software Vulnerabilities and Defenses Today Antonio Hüseyin Barresi 2014 2 MorrisMorris WormWorm 3 Long ago – late 1980s • On November 2, 1988 the Morris Worm was released • Mainstream media attention • Conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act • First well-known program exploiting a buffer overflow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm 4 25 years later Memory errors and memory corruption vulnerabilities are still an issue! 5 This talk is about • Why these bugs are still a concern • How exploits work • Modern defenses 6 MotivationMotivation 7 Today, 2014 • Memory errors are still a problem • “Unsafe“ languages like C/C++ very popular • Prediction: C/C++ will be with us for a long time • Yes, there are alternatives... sometimes • Criminals found ways of monetization • Software systems are gaining complexity http://www.langpop.com/ http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html 8 Terminology Exploit “An exploit is a piece of software, a chunk of data, or a sequence of commands that takes advantage of a bug, glitch or vulnerability in order to...“ Zero-Day Attack “A zero-day attack or threat is an attack that exploits a previously unknown vulnerability in a computer application, ...“ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploit_(computer_security) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-day_attack 9 Attacks Victim Attacker Runs a malicious web server serving HTML documents that trigger a memory error within the web browser Runs a vulnerable web browser or PDF reader Sends a malicious PDF attachement by email Exploits memory error within vulnerable victim software GET /index.html HTTP/1.1 Host: www.vulnsite.com Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive $>./exploit 192.168.1.28 Cookie: CID=r2t5uvjq43 5r4q7ib3vtdjq120f83jf8 .. -
Malware Detection Techiniques and Tools for Android Mobile – a Brief Review
International Journal of Latest Research in Engineering and Technology (IJLRET) ISSN: 2454-5031 www.ijlret.com || Volume 03 - Issue 03 || March 2017 || PP. 102-105 Malware Detection Techiniques and Tools for Android Mobile – A Brief Review Dr. Bhaskar V. Patil#1 #1Bharati Vidyapeeth University Yashwantrao Mohite institute of Management, Karad [M.S.], INDIA Dr. Rahul J. Jadhav#2 21Bharati Vidyapeeth University Yashwantrao Mohite institute of Management, Karad [M.S.], INDIA Abstract: Android has the biggest market share among all Smartphone operating system. The number of devices running with the Android operating system has been on the rise. By the end of 2012, it will account for nearly half of the world's Smartphone market. Along with its growth, the importance of security has also risen. Security is one of the main concerns for Smartphone users today. As the power and features of Smartphone’s increase, so has their vulnerability for attacks by viruses etc. Perhaps android is more secured operating system than any other Smartphone operating system today. Android has very few restrictions for developer, increases the security risk for end users. Antivirus Android apps remain one of the most popular types of applications on Android. Some people either like having that extra security or just want to be extra cautious just in case and there is nothing wrong with that. In this list, we’ll check out the best antivirus Android apps and anti-malware apps on Android! The efficacies of these applications have not been empirically established. This paper analyzes some of the security tools written for the Android platform to gauge their effectiveness at mitigating spyware and malware. -
Flashdetect: Actionscript 3 Malware Detection
FlashDetect: ActionScript 3 malware detection Timon Van Overveldt1, Christopher Kruegel23, and Giovanni Vigna23 1 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, [email protected] 2 University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, {chris,vigna}@cs.ucsb.edu 3 Lastline, Inc. Abstract. Adobe Flash is present on nearly every PC, and it is in- creasingly being targeted by malware authors. Despite this, research into methods for detecting malicious Flash files has been limited. Similarly, there is very little documentation available about the techniques com- monly used by Flash malware. Instead, most research has focused on JavaScript malware. This paper discusses common techniques such as heap spraying, JIT spraying, and type confusion exploitation in the context of Flash mal- ware. Where applicable, these techniques are compared to those used in malicious JavaScript. Subsequently, FlashDetect is presented, an off- line Flash file analyzer that uses both dynamic and static analysis, and that can detect malicious Flash files using ActionScript 3. FlashDetect classifies submitted files using a naive Bayesian classifier based on a set of predefined features. Our experiments show that FlashDetect has high classification accuracy, and that its efficacy is comparable with that of commercial anti-virus products. Keywords: Flash exploit analysis, malicious ActionScript 3 detection, Flash type confusion 1 Introduction Adobe Flash is a technology that provides advanced video playback and anima- tion capabilities to developers through an advanced scripting language. The files played by Flash, called SWFs, are often embedded into webpages to be played by a browser plugin, or are embedded into a PDF file to be played by a copy of the Flash Player included in Adobe’s Acrobat Reader.