Dailydave mailing list archives

Re: The sky's downward trajectory


From: "Dominique Brezinski" <dominique.brezinski () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 23:15:21 -0800

Vista's stack gets 14 bits, heap and image 8 bits and PEB 4 bits.

Ollie Whitehouse did a complete analysis of Vista's ALSR
implementation in the final release that he will be presenting at
Black Hat DC in a week. For those of you that can't make it, we should
have his presentation up online shortly after the conference. I
believe Symantec will also be publishing the white paper then. His
analysis looks at the statistical distributions within the various
process-space segments that are randomized with some interesting
results. I think the material will be good reading for this list.

Cheers,
Dominique

On 2/19/07, Jonathan Wilkins <jwilkins () gmail com> wrote:
Ok, I dug a little more and here's what I found:
http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_howard/archive/2006/05/26/address-space-layout-randomization-in-windows-vista.aspx
"This helps defeat a well-understood attack called "return-to-libc",
where exploit code attempts to call a system function [...] In the
case of Windows Vista Beta 2, a DLL or EXE could be loaded into any of
256 locations, which means an attacker has a 1/256 chance of getting
the address right.

Confirmed by skape here:
http://blog.metasploit.com/2006/06/few-quick-updates.html
"Microsoft's implementation is limited to 8 bits of entropy in the 3rd octet"

Those posts are both pre-final Vista, as was ToorCon, so I'm not
certain how things might
have changed.

On 2/19/07, jf <jf () danglingpointers net> wrote:
As I understood it, they are only randomized once at boot time with 4 bits
of entropy, and it's currently opt-in for most applications (including
IE), but opt-out for system DLLs. I tend to agree that only randomizing
once may be an issue, but no one seems to agree with me.

On Mon, 19 Feb 2007, endrazine wrote:

Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 19:27:33 +0100
From: endrazine <endrazine () gmail com>
To: Rhys Kidd <rhyskidd () gmail com>
Cc: dailydave () lists immunitysec com
Subject: Re: [Dailydave] The sky's downward trajectory

Hi dear readers,

Rhys Kidd a écrit :

So what does Microsoft provide to make this more secure?

Firstly the push by Michael Howard et al to get ASLR implemented in
Vista beta 2 and above means the addresses within ntdll.dll are going
to be somewhat random, thereby making reliable use of this technique
difficult. NX bit based defenses really should be implemented
hand-in-hand with some form of memory randomisation, as was documented
by the PaX project.

Put me in my place if I'm wrong, but adresses are only randomized once
at boot up, making the Vista randomization far less effective than a run
time randomization a la PaX. Well, at least, thats what I understood
from the Microsoft TechDays in Paris 2 weeks ago.
Secondly, as Dave mentioned setting "AlwaysOn" in boot.ini should
prevent DEP from being disabled on a per-process basis.

HTH.
Rhys


Regards,

endrazine-
_______________________________________________
Dailydave mailing list
Dailydave () lists immunitysec com
http://lists.immunitysec.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave

_______________________________________________
Dailydave mailing list
Dailydave () lists immunitysec com
http://lists.immunitysec.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave

_______________________________________________
Dailydave mailing list
Dailydave () lists immunitysec com
http://lists.immunitysec.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave

_______________________________________________
Dailydave mailing list
Dailydave () lists immunitysec com
http://lists.immunitysec.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave


Current thread: