Cyber Risks · Google Project Zero

Life After the Isolated Heap

Summary: Project Zero's Natalie Silvanovich analyzed how Adobe's Isolated Heap, which partitions Flash's MMgc heap into three areas to separate objects likely to contain corruption bugs from objects useful for exploiting them, affected exploitability of two bugs found after its implementation. She reported CVE-2016-0998, an uninitialized variable in a fix to an ActionScript 2 use-after-free, to Adobe on February 3, 2016 (patched March 10), and CVE-2016-0984, a use-after-free in sound processing, on January 11, 2016 (patched February 16).

What's compelling: The Isolated Heap blocked Silvanovich's preferred path of reallocating a script-controlled byte buffer into a pointer-bearing object, because all script-controllable byte buffers land in partition 3, which holds no other pointer-containing types - forcing her to chain a second bug, CVE-2016-0984, to break ASLR.

Read the original at Google Project Zero ↗

Topics
Zero-Days & Exploits
Mentions
CVE-2016-0998
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