Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Local PrivEscs that are Remote Code Execution

One thing you will notice if you read the NSA advisory yesterday and the Microsoft advisory is that the NSA advisory had MORE information in it. Despite both organizations being "defenders" this is because software vendors have views of the world colored by a completely different view of systemic risk. Sometimes this means advisories get issued for vulnerabilities that are not really exploitable, but typically it means the impact of a vulnerability is vastly underrated. This is presumably why Project Zero releases full details at 90 days, instead of letting the vendor do all public communication, but it's also why most bug bounties include non-disclosure clauses.

In other words, if vendors had their way, an advisory would have less information in it than a fortune cookie.


If you've been in the security research business then you also know that vendors, and often other researchers, will often under-analyze a vulnerability. It's an interesting metric to have to see which bugs got patched, but were called LPEs when you really know they are RCE. Some companies are known to label every remote heap overflow a "crash/DoS", which becomes a funny meme, but also has strategic implications for critical infrastructure.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that a disparity in information is a disparity of control, and nothing leverages this more than an operator in the cyber domain.

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