Understanding IE 11 CVE-2015-2419 Exploitation

[Nytro]

It’s been a while since a pure JavaScript vulnerability was widely used by exploit kits. The last few years mostly gave us IE Use-After-Free vulnerabilities. When those were dealt with by Microsoft’s IsolatedHeap and MemoryProtection mechanisms, introduced in the middle of 2014, the stage was clear for Flash to take over.

Now, as Flash is marching towards its imminent death, Silverlight has been dying for a long time, and Java applets must be signed and played only after the user is prompted, we can expect some new trend to arrive on the scene.

 

CVE-2015-2419 (Jscript9 Memory Corruption), the subject of our paper, was patched 5 months ago, but is still used across most Exploit Kits. However, no satisfying analysis, regarding either its root cause or how to successfully exploit it, has been published. We think an analysis of this kind is needed: First, to see a pure JS exploit for IE 11, despite the heap corruption mitigations in IE mentioned above. Second, unless Microsoft comes up with similar protections for IE’s JS engine, this might be the kickoff for similar exploits as soon as Flash disappears.

We started with a working exploit taken from Rig EK (MD5: 4497f09502758ae82f122b21b17d3644. It looks exactly the same as in Angler EK). It’s heavily obfuscated and tricky, which makes the job of understanding the vulnerability, and the exploit directly from the exploit code, very complicated.

Let’s dig in to the process of analyzing this exploit.

 

Link: http://blog.checkpoint.com/2016/02/10/too-much-freedom-is-dangerous-understanding-ie-11-cve-2015-2419-exploitation/