Security Makers Use Adobe Avoiding Attacks on Windows PCs
By Gina on February 8, 2010 | Vulnerabilities, Security, Adobe, Attact, Computer, Windows, researcher
Recent examples show that researchers failed and have serious issues by making sure the security of Internet Explorer from the attackers. The latest versions of IE seemed to be vulnerable because the attackers demonstrated they can make and use a hole for their own malicious interests.
For that reason researchers tried to use the weakness in Adobe Systems' Flash Player and created two separate attacks that bypass mitigation Microsoft put into IE 7 and 8. Called as ASLR, or address space layout randomization, and DEP, or data execution prevention, the technologies are devised to make troubles for bugs by causing the execution of malicious code.
The main goal of those techniques is to use the so called just-in-time compiler in Flash so that a PC's memory would be blanketed with many chunks of identical shell-code. The "JIT-spray" lets attackers to overcome ASLR.
"With this JIT-spray, it works fairly reliably, so at least nine out of 10 times you'll guess the right position," said researcher Dionysus Blazakis at the Black Hat security conference in Washington, DC.
An attempts to attack IE 8 was quite useless because ASLR and DEP was some of the only defenses preventing crucial exploits of bugs overflow in software running on Windows computers.
With a help by JIT-spraying, Blazakis was able to avoid a cause IE 8 to open the Windows calculator. It was an argument that he could use Adobe bug to kill code by himself.
What is more, it is not the first time attackers trying to threat for Microsoft software by making an attempt to bypass the memory protections. After a so called heap spraying technique was on the board Microsoft added protections to thwart it in IE 8. This time it is not clear at all that Microsoft will be able to avoid the newfangled attacks so easily.
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