Co-Authoring Windows Internals 5th Edition

I’ve been a bit slow updating the blog, and so today, I want to take the time to explain what’s been keeping me busy by shareing some exciting news. As this post’s title suggests, I am indeed co-authoring Windows Internals 5th Edition, the latest update to Mark Russinovich and David Solomon‘s Windows Internals 4th Edition book.

The book will mark a return to the previous format of the series — unlike the last edition which covered all supported Windows NT operating systems (2000, XP, 2003), this edition will only cover the Vista and Server 2008 operating systems. This is a great change, because it means less time is explaining minute differences between the 4 different algorithms used in a lookup in each version, and more time is spent talking about what really matters — the behavior and design decisions of the OS.

I’m happy to say this new edition will have a least 250 pages of new information, not only updating various chapters with new Vista/Server 2008 changes, but also adding entirely new sections which previous editions had never touched on, such as the user mode loader in Ntdll.dll, the user mode debugging framework, and the hypervisor. It isn’t only the internals information that will benefit from the update; as a matter of fact, all references to tools, resources and books have also been updated, including up-to-date information on the latest Sysinternals tools, as well as exciting, helpful new experiments that demonstrate the behaviors explained in the text. For those of you who have read Mark’s TechNet Magazine “Inside Vista Kernel Changes” series and its Server 2008 counterpart (for those who haven’t, I strongly suggest you do!), you’ll be glad to know that the book includes all that information and expands on it as well.

The book work is still ongoing, but planned to end soon, after which it should go to print in October and be on shelves in January 2009. My book work is about to reach its one-year anniversary, and I must say that working with Mark and David has been a pleasurable learning experience, as well as a great chance to continue my reverse engineering work and hone my skills. What made ReactOS fun was being able to share my discoveries with the world as code — the book work has allowed me to share that information as text, part of the best internals book available, to a much wider audience. I’m thankful for that, and I can’t wait for everyone to have a chance to read it!

Look for the book hitting your nearest bookstore just after New Year’s. As a sneak peak, here’s a high-quality copy of the book’s cover while you wait.

Book Cover

Black Hat 2008 Wrap-up

This year I had the chance to present some security-related findings that I had made earlier during the year inside Win32k.sys, the Windows GUI Subsystem and Window Manager. I presented a total of four bugs, all local Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Two of these attacks could be done on any system up to Vista SP0 (one up to Server 2008) from any account, while the other two were NULL-pointer dereferences that required administrative access to exploit (however, since they are NULL-pointer dereferences, the risk for user->kernel elevation exists in one of them).

Because the first two attacks (from any guest account) relied on highly internal behavior of the Windows NT Kernel (used in all of Microsoft’s modern operating systems today), I thought it was interesting to talk a bit about the internals themselves, and then present the actual bug, as well as some developer guidance on how to avoid hitting this bug.

I’d like to thank everyone who came to see the talk, and I really appreciated the questions and comments I received. I’ve also finally found out why Win32k functions are called “xxx” and “yyy”. Now I just need to find out about “zzz”. I’ll probably share this information in a later post, when I can talk more about Win32k internals.

As promised, you’ll find below a link to the slides. As for proof of concept code, it’s currently sitting on my home machine, so it’ll take another week. On the other hand, the slides make three of the bugs very clear in pseudo-code. I’ll re-iterate them at the bottom of the post.

One final matter — it seems I have been unable to make the bh08@alex-ionescu.com email work due to issues with my host. For the moment, please use another e-mail to contact me, such as my Google Mail account. My email address is the first letter of my first name (Alex) followed by my entire last name (Ionescu).

Slides here: Keynote and PDF.

Bug 1:
1) Handle = OpenProcess(Csrss)
2) CreateRemoteThread(Handle, …, NtUserGetThreadState, 15, …)

Bug 2:
1) Handle = CreateWindowStation(…)
2) SetHandleInformation(Handle, ProtectFromClose)
3) CloseWindowStation(Handle)

Bug 3:
1) Handle = CreateWindowStation(…)
2) Loop all handles in the process with the NtQuerySystemInformation API, or, just blindly loop every handle from 4 to 16 million and mark it as protected, or, use Process Explorer to see what the current Window Station handle is, and hard-code that for this run. The point is to find the handle to the current window station. Usually this will be a low number, typically under 0x50.
3) SetHandleInformation(CurrentWinstaHandle, ProtectFromClose)
4) SwitchProcessWindowStation(Handle);