{"id":3025,"date":"2011-01-04T11:02:38","date_gmt":"2011-01-04T11:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/?p=3025"},"modified":"2015-09-09T19:37:20","modified_gmt":"2015-09-09T11:37:20","slug":"internet-explorer-zero-day-accidentally-leaked-to-chinese-hackers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/2011\/01\/internet-explorer-zero-day-accidentally-leaked-to-chinese-hackers\/","title":{"rendered":"Internet Explorer Zero-Day Accidentally Leaked To Chinese Hackers"},"content":{"rendered":"

First up, happy new year – let’s hope 2011 is an interesting year for the infosec community. Anyway today’s story is about the recently released tool cross_fuzz<\/a> by Michal Zalewski and an inadvertent leak that have occurred.<\/p>\n

tl;dr version is something like this: Michal Zalewski writes a DOM fuzze<\/a>r, fuzzes IE, finds flaws, Chinese dudes Google some .dll functions and find fuzzer results.<\/p>\n

It could be some kind of weird coincidence, or you could read a whole conspiracy theory into it (unreleased tool, very specific search terms etc.).<\/p>\n

Details concerning a potentially serious security vulnerability in fully patched versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer have been leaked to people in China, a researcher warned over the weekend.<\/p>\n

Michal Zalewski, a security researcher at Google, blogged that data concerning at least one \u201cclearly exploitable crash\u201d in the Microsoft browser was inadvertently disclosed to people who were using a Chinese IP address. Details about the bug, which resides in the mshtml.dll component, were stored on a server that had accidentally been indexed by Google, Zalewski wrote elsewhere. On December 30, detailed search queries showed that the sensitive information, in addition to files for an unpublished security tool, had been retrieved by the unknown party.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis pattern is very strongly indicative of an independent discovery of the same fault condition in MSIE by unrelated means,\u201d Zalewski wrote. \u201cOther explanations for this pair of consecutive searches seem extremely unlikely.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bug leads to arbitrary crashes in the EIP, or extended instruction pointer, of machines running the Microsoft browser. Zalewski said the flaw \u201cis pretty much fully attacker-controlled.\u201d It was uncovered using cross_fuzz, a security tool the researcher developed in his spare time more than two years ago to identify potential security vulnerabilities in IE, Firefox, and other browsers. Since its release, the tool has helped to identify nearly 100 various browser bugs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can find the complete history between MZ and Microsoft<\/a> regarding both ref_fuzz and cross_fuzz here:<\/p>\n

fuzzer_timeline.txt<\/a><\/p>\n

As for the ‘discovery’ it does seem likely that someone else had already discovered the same vulnerability and were searching for further information about it and if it had been published\/disclosed. The search logs are here:<\/p>\n

known_vuln.txt<\/a><\/p>\n