Executable installers are vulnerable^WEVIL (case 34): Microsoft's vs-community-*.exe susceptible to DLL hijacking

["Stefan Kanthak" <stefan.kanthak () nexgo de>]

Hi @ll,

the executable installer for Microsoft's Visual Studio 2015
Community Edition, available from <https://www.visualstudio.com/>,
is vulnerable to DLL hijacking: on a fully patched Windows 7 SP1
it loads the following DLLs from its "application directory"
instead of Windows' "system directory":
Version.dll, AppHelp.dll, NTMARTA.dll, CryptSP.dll, RPCRTRemote.dll

Additionally it loads API-MS-Win-Downlevel-ShlWAPI-L2-1-0.dll from
the PATH.

See <http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2016-0148>
or <https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/MS16-041> and
<https://www.securify.nl/advisory/SFY20160201/_net_framework_4_6_allows_side_loading_of_windows_api_set_dll.html>
for a similar vulnerability.


stay tuned
Stefan Kanthak


Timeline:
~~~~~~~~~

2016-06-01    sent vulnerability report to vendor plus US-CERT

              NO RESPONSE from vendor, not even an acknowledgement
              of receipt

2016-06-07    US-CERT tells me that Microsoft informed them that
              they won't act on this report

              still no response from vendor

2016-07-01    report published