Uploaded October 2019 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
Writing a working exploit for a vulnerability is generally challenging, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. To address this issue, automated exploit generation techniques can be adopted. In practice, existing techniques however exhibit an insufficient ability to craft exploits, particularly for the kernel vulnerabilities. On the one hand, this is because their technical approaches explore exploitability only in the context of a crashing process whereas generating an exploit for a kernel vulnerability typically needs to vary the context of a kernel panic. On the other hand, this is due to the fact that the program analysis techniques used for exploit generation are suitable only for simple programs but not the OS kernel which has higher complexity and scalability.
In this talk, we will introduce and release a new exploitation framework to fully automate the exploitation of kernel vulnerabilities. Technically speaking, our framework utilizes a kernel fuzzing technique to diversify the contexts of a kernel panic and then leverages symbolic execution to explore exploitability under different contexts. We demonstrate that this new exploitation framework facilitates exploit crafting from many aspects.
First, it augments a security analyst with the ability to automate the identification of system calls that he needs to take advantages for vulnerability exploitation. Second, it provides security analysts with the ability to achieve security mitigation bypassing. Third, it allows security analysts to automatically generate exploits with different exploitation objectives (e.g., privilege escalation or data leakage). Last but not least, it equips security analysts with an ability to generate exploits even for those kernel vulnerabilities for which the exploitability has not yet been confirmed or verified.
Along with this talk, we will also release many unpublished working exploits against several kernel vulnerabilities. It should be noted that, the vulnerabilities we experimented cover primarily Use-After-Free and heap overflow. Among all these test cases, more than 50% of them do not have working exploits publicly available. To illustrate this release, I have already disclosed one working exploit at my personal website (http://ww9210.cn/). The exploit released on my site pertains to CVE-2017-15649 for which there has not yet been an exploit publicly available with the demonstration of bypassing SMAP.
Black Hat USA 2018
Writing a working exploit for a vulnerability is generally challenging, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. To address this issue, automated exploit generation techniques can be adopted. In practice, existing techniques however exhibit an insufficient ability to craft exploits, particularly for the kernel vulnerabilities. On the one hand, this is because their technical approaches explore exploitability only in the context of a crashing process whereas generating an exploit for a kernel vulnerability typically needs to vary the context of a kernel panic. On the other hand, this is due to the fact that the program analysis techniques used for exploit generation are suitable only for simple programs but not the OS kernel which has higher complexity and scalability.
In this talk, we will introduce and release a new exploitation framework to fully automate the exploitation of kernel vulnerabilities. Technically speaking, our framework utilizes a kernel fuzzing technique to diversify the contexts of a kernel panic and then leverages symbolic execution to explore exploitability under different contexts. We demonstrate that this new exploitation framework facilitates exploit crafting from many aspects.
First, it augments a security analyst with the ability to automate the identification of system calls that he needs to take advantages for vulnerability exploitation. Second, it provides security analysts with the ability to achieve security mitigation bypassing. Third, it allows security analysts to automatically generate exploits with different exploitation objectives (e.g., privilege escalation or data leakage). Last but not least, it equips security analysts with an ability to generate exploits even for those kernel vulnerabilities for which the exploitability has not yet been confirmed or verified.
Along with this talk, we will also release many unpublished working exploits against several kernel vulnerabilities. It should be noted that, the vulnerabilities we experimented cover primarily Use-After-Free and heap overflow. Among all these test cases, more than 50% of them do not have working exploits publicly available. To illustrate this release, I have already disclosed one working exploit at my personal website (http://ww9210.cn/). The exploit released on my site pertains to CVE-2017-15649 for which there has not yet been an exploit publicly available with the demonstration of bypassing SMAP.
Black Hat USA 2018
![Black Hat USA 2018 - Mainframe [z/OS] Reverse Engineering and Exploit Development](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/opBLBYAR8tU/mqdefault.jpg "Black Hat USA 2018 - Mainframe [z/OS] Reverse Engineering and Exploit Development
Speak with any Fortune 500 running mainframe and theyll tell you two things: (1) without their mainframes theyd be out of business (2) they do not conduct any security research on them, let alone vulnerability scans. The most infuriating part is that mainframes are simply computers, theyre different from what youre used to, but that doesnt mean they cant be hacked. Previous talks about this topic have covered the platform from a high level, imploring you to do the basics. This talk continues this series of talks, given by others, around mainframe hacking. Previously covered topics included network penetration testing and privilege escalation. To complement those talks, this talk will expose attendees to the various tools that exist on the platform to help you do your own reverse engineering, followed by detailed steps on how to start your own exploit development. Attendees will learn what debuggers are available on the platform, such as dbx and ASMIDF, as well as the challenges youll have using them. After learning how to RE, attendees will then learn how to develop their own exploits and buffer overflows on the platform using C, assembler and JCL. A demo program will be used to teach all these items so people can follow along. Topics included in this discussion are APF authorization, bypassing RACF/ACEE, TSO, Unix System Services.")
