Speculating the entire x86-64 Instruction Set In Seconds with This One Weird Trick

As cheesy as the title sounds, I promise it cannot beat the cheesiness of the technique I’ll be telling you about in this post. The morning I saw Mark Ermolov’s tweet about the undocumented instruction reading from/writing to the CRBUS, I had a bit of free time in my hands and I knew I…

Writing an optimizing IL compiler, for dummies, by a dummy: 0x1 Symbolic Expressions

Before I begin this series of blog posts, I would like to add a small disclaimer. I have no prior experience or academic knowledge when it comes to compiler development so I might not use the correct jargon or state of the art algorithm, but nonetheless, I wanted to share my journey working on VTIL which is…

ByePg: Defeating Patchguard using Exception-hooking

Now I know what you are thinking, exception hooks? …in kernel-mode? Yes, it is certainly is not as easy as a mere call to kernel32!AddVectoredExceptionHandler, but with some thinking out of the box we actually can implement a system-wide exception handler. As much as Microsoft wants you to forget, filling WDK with abstractions over abstractions, frightening you…

Arbitrary Code Execution at Ring 0 using CVE-2018-8897

Just a few days ago, a new vulnerability allowing an unprivileged user to run #DB handler with user-mode GSBASE was found by Nick Peterson (@nickeverdox) and Nemanja Mulasmajic (@0xNemi). At the end of the whitepaper they published on triplefault.io, they mentioned that they were able to load and execute unsigned kernel code, which got me interested in…

Making the Perfect Injector: Abusing Windows Address Sanitization and CoW

By the end of this post, I aim to make an injector unlike any other: one that by design makes your DLL not debuggable from UM, makes your pages invisible to NtQueryVirtualMemory and NtReadVirtualMemory, and lets you execute code in target process without even having a valid handle; and while doing this I want it to be compatible with…

Escaping SMEP Hell: Exploiting Capcom Driver In a Safe Manner

Trapped in a SMEP disabled payload not being able to do anything reliably? You have come to the right place. I’ve seen so many people using Capcom driver in an unsafe manner that I wanted to make this post, simply explaining why some practices are incredibly unsafe and how we can fix this. When these problems are pointed out, the…

Splitting Data from Code, Forgotten x86 Feature: Segmentation

With the introduction of sTLB with Intel Nehalem, TLB splitting — once a reliable technique — became a thing of the past. Those who had to hook user-mode stealthily started looking into hypervisors; specifically EPT violations. However, implementing a hypervisor means implementing bloated, platform dependent code which is not the best way to go when you are trying to ship…