Uninformed: Informative Information for the Uninformed

Vol 6» 2007.Jan


Conclusion

Technology that can be used to help prevent the exploitation of user-mode vulnerabilities is now becoming common place on modern desktop platforms. This represents a marked improvement that should, in the long run, make the exploitation of many user-mode vulnerabilities much more difficult or even impossible. That being said, there is an apparent lack of equivalent technology that can help to prevent the exploitation of kernel-mode vulnerabilities. The public justification for the lack of equivalent technology typically centers around the argument that kernel-mode vulnerabilities are difficult to exploit and are too few in number to actually warrant the integration of exploit prevention features. In actuality, sad though it may seem, the justification really boils down to a business cost issue. At present, kernel-mode vulnerabilities don't account for enough money in lost revenue to support the time investment needed to implement and test kernel-mode exploit prevention features.

In the interest of helping to balance the business cost equation, the authors have described a process that can be used to identify and exploit 802.11 wireless device driver vulnerabilities on Windows. This process includes steps that can be taken to fuzz the different ways in which 802.11 device drivers process 802.11 packets. In certain cases, flaws may be detected in a particular device driver's processing of certain packets, such as Beacon requests and Probe responses. When these flaws are detected, exploits can be developed using the features that have been integrated into the 3.0 version of the Metasploit Framework that help to streamline the process of transmitting crafted 802.11 packets in an effort to gain code execution.

Through the description of this process, it is hoped that the reader will see that kernel-mode vulnerabilities can be just as easy to identify and exploit as user-mode. Furthermore, it is hoped that this description will help to eliminate the false impression that all kernel-mode vulnerabilities are much more difficult to exploit6.1. While an emphasis has been put upon 802.11 wireless device drivers, many different device drivers have the potential for exposing vulnerabilities. Looking toward the future, there are many different opportunities for research, both from an attack and defense point of view.

From an attack point of view, there's no shortage of interesting research topics. As it relates to 802.11 wireless device driver vulnerabilities, much more advanced 802.11 protocol fuzzers can be developed that are capable of reaching features exposed by all of the protocol client states rather than focusing on the unauthenticated and unassociated state. For device drivers in general, the development of fuzzers that attack the IOCTL interface exposed by device objects would provide good insight into a wide range of locally exposed vulnerabilities. Aside from techniques used to identify vulnerabilities, it's expected that researching of techniques used to actually take advantage of different types of kernel-mode vulnerabilities will continue to evolve and become more reliable. From a defense point of view, there is a definite need for research that is focused on making the exploitation of kernel-mode vulnerabilities either impossible or less reliable. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for kernel-mode vulnerabilities.