MS Edge CMarkup::EnsureDeleteCFState Use-After-Free
Posted on 02 December 2016
As I am sure you are by now well aware, in November I decided to start releasing details on all vulnerabilities I found in web-browsers that I had not released before. As I was unable to publish all of them within a single month, I will try to continue to publish all my old vulnerabilities, including those not in web-browser, as long as I can find some time to do so. If you find this information useful, you can help me make some time available by donating bitcoin to 183yyxa9s1s1f7JBpAPHPmzAQ346y91Rx5DX. This is the twenty-third entry in the series. This information is available in more detail on my blog at http://blog.skylined.nl/20161201001.html. There you can find a repro that triggered this issue in addition to the information below. Follow me on http://twitter.com/berendjanwever for daily browser bugs. MS Edge CMarkup::EnsureDeleteCFState use-after-free =================================================== (MS15-125, CVE-2015-6168) Synopsis -------- A specially crafted web-page can trigger a memory corruption vulnerability in Microsoft Edge. I did not investigate this vulnerability thoroughly, so I cannot speculate on the potential impact or exploitability. Known affected software and attack vectors ------------------------------------------ * Microsoft Edge 11.0.10240.16384 An attacker would need to get a target user to open a specially crafted web-page. Disabling JavaScript does not prevent an attacker from triggering the vulnerable code path. Description ----------- At the time this issue was first discovered, MemGC was just introduced, and I had not yet fully appreciated what an impact it would have on mitigating use-after-free bugs. Despite MemGC being enabled in Microsoft Edge by default, this issue appeared to me to have been a use-after-free vulnerability. However, both Microsoft and ZDI (whom I sold the vulnerability to) describes it as a memory corruption vulnerability, so it's probably more complex than I assumed. At the time, I did not consider this vulnerability to be of great interest, as there was no immediately obvious way of controlling the vulnerability in order to exploit it. So, I did not do any further investigation into the root cause and, if this was indeed a use-after-free, how come MemGC did not mitigate it? In hindsight, it would have been a good idea to investigate the root cause, as any use-after-free that is not mitigated by MemGC might provide hints on how to find more vulnerabilities that bypass it. Time-line --------- * August 2015: This vulnerability was found through fuzzing. * August 2015: This vulnerability was submitted to ZDI. * December 2015: Microsoft addresses this vulnerability in MS15-125. * December 2016: Details of this vulnerability are released. Cheers, SkyLined Repro /<style>:first-letter{word-spacing:9 Variation x<style>:first-letter{background-position:inherit
