Black Hat Webcast 3: How to Impress Girls with Browser Memory Protection Bypasses

Over the past several years, Microsoft has implemented a number of memory protection mechanisms with the goal of preventing the reliable exploitation of common software vulnerabilities on the Windows platform. Protection mechanisms such as GS, SafeSEH, DEP and ASLR complicate the exploitation of many memory corruption vulnerabilities and at first sight present an insurmountable obstacle for exploit developers.

This talk aims to present exploitation methodologies against this increasingly complex target. We will demonstrate how the inherent design limitations of the protection mechanisms in Windows Vista make them ineffective for preventing the exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities in browsers and other client applications.

Each of the aforementioned protections will be briefly introduced and its design limitations will be discussed. We will present a variety of techniques that can be used to bypass the protections and achieve reliable remote code execution in many different circumstances. Finally, we will discuss what Microsoft can do to increase the effectiveness of the memory protections at the expense of annoying Vista users even more.