Cyber Risks · Google Project Zero

What does a pointer look like, anyway?

Summary: Project Zero's Chris Evans reported four Adobe Flash Player memory-leakage vulnerabilities (CVE-2014-0542 through CVE-2014-0545) that Adobe fixed in its August 2014 security update, roughly 30 days after report. All four stem from image decoding that leaves uninitialized pixels in ActionScript-readable canvases, triggered by malformed inputs such as a two-component JPEG, a 1bpp image, and zlib streams truncated after emitting zero pixels.

What you should know: Rich ActionScript APIs let an attacker read those uninitialized canvas pixels directly, turning a rendering failure into a memory address randomization bypass - and in CVE-2014-0544 the leaked 64-bit pointers were so cleanly aligned that the proof of concept recovered them with no uncertainty.

Read the original at Google Project Zero ↗

Topics
Vulnerabilities & Patching
Mentions
CVE-2014-0540CVE-2014-0542CVE-2014-0543CVE-2014-0544CVE-2014-0545
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