Vulnerability research

A comprehensive guide for vulnerability reporters.

How to exploit a double-free vulnerability in Ubuntu’s accountsservice (CVE-2021-3939)

Recently, the Copyright Office responded to the calls to clarify the scope of protected security research.

In this post, I’ll use three bugs that I reported to Qualcomm in the NPU (neural processing unit) driver to gain arbitrary kernel code execution as root user and disable SELinux from the untrusted app sandbox in an Android phone.

The Exiv2 team tightened our security by enabling GitHub’s code scanning feature and adding custom queries tailored to the Exiv2 code base.

This post is a technical analysis of a recently disclosed Chrome vulnerability in the garbage collector of v8 (CVE-2021-37975) that was believed to be exploited in the wild. This vulnerability was reported by an anonymous researcher and was patched on September 30, 2021 in Chrome version 94.0.4606.71. I’ll cover the root cause analysis of the bug, as well as detailed exploitation.

GitHub’s bug bounty team is excited to kick off Cybersecurity Awareness Month with a spotlight on two security researchers who participate in the GitHub Security Bug Bounty Program.

In this post, I’ll exploit a use-after-free (CVE-2021-30528) in the Chrome browser process that I reported to escape the Chrome sandbox. This is a fairly interesting bug that shows some of the subtleties involved in the interactions between C++ and Java in the Android version of Chrome.

This post is a technical analysis of a recently disclosed Chrome JIT vulnerability (CVE-2021-30632) that was believed to be exploited in the wild. This vulnerability was reported by an anonymous researcher and was patched on September 13, 2021 in Chrome version 93.0.4577.82. I’ll cover the root cause analysis of the bug, as well as detailed exploitation.

During an audit of Apache Dubbo v2.7.8 source code, I found multiple vulnerabilities enabling attackers to compromise and run arbitrary system commands on both Dubbo consumers and providers. In this blog post I detailed how I leveraged CodeQL as an audit oracle to help me find these issues.

We put out a call to open source developers and security researchers to talk about the security vulnerability disclosure process. Here’s what we found.

Between July 21, 2021 and August 13, 2021 we received reports through one of our private security bug bounty programs from researchers regarding vulnerabilities in tar and @npmcli/arborist.

GitHub’s bug bounty program is now a mature component of how we improve product security. We’re excited to highlight some achievements (and interesting vulnerabilities)!

polkit is a system service installed by default on many Linux distributions. It’s used by systemd, so any Linux distribution that uses systemd also uses polkit.

In this second installment, I will focus on how to build our own custom ASAN interceptors in order to catch memory bugs when custom memory pools are implemented and also on how to intercept file system syscalls to detect logic errors in the target application.