If you find that news sobering, consider how (relatively) quickly the Dutch hacker, Peter Vreugdenhil, was able to develop a working exploit. From Ryan Naraine at the Threatpost blog:
"I started with a bypass for ALSR which gave me the base address for one of the modules loaded into IE. I used that knowledge to do the DEP bypass," he added.Vreugdenhil, who won a $10,000 cash prize and a new Windows machine, said he uses fuzzing techniques to find software vulnerabilities. "I specifically looking through my fuzzing logs for a bug like this because I could use it to do the ASLR bypass, he said.
After finding the IE 8 vulnerability, Vreugdenhil said it took about two weeks to write an exploit to get around the ASLR+DEP mitigations.
"Fuzzing" techniques include using tools that throw random data (essentially junk) at software inputs to see what happens.
Vreugdenhil published a brief paper [.PDF] explaining how he bypassed both ASLR and DEP.
The demonstration took place at the CanSecWest Vancouver security conference, underway now. It's part of a contest funded by intrusion-prevention provider Tipping Point. More than $100,000 in prizes are earmarked for hackers who can break into leading Internet browsers and mobile platforms for the iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian, and Andriod.
IE 8 running on Windows 7 wasn't the only browser to fall at the conference so far. The iPhone, Safari, and Mozilla Firefox also fell to exploits designed to take advantage of zero-day vulnerabilities in all of those systems.
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