Vulnerability research

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.

In this last post of the series, I’ll exploit a use-after-free in the Chrome renderer (CVE-2020-15972), a bug that I reported in September 2020 but turned out to be a duplicate, to gain remote code execution in the sandboxed renderer process in Chrome.

On March 8, we shared that, out of an abundance of caution, we logged all users out of GitHub.com due to a rare security vulnerability. We believe that transparency is…

In this series of posts, I’ll go through the exploit of three security bugs that I reported, which, when used together, can achieve remote kernel code execution in Qualcomm’s devices by visiting a malicious website in a beta version of Chrome. In this first post, I’ll exploit a use-after-free in Qualcomm’s kgsl driver (CVE-2020-11239), a bug that I reported in July 2020 and that was fixed in January 2021, to gain arbitrary kernel code execution from the application domain.

In this second post of the series, I’ll exploit a use-after-free in the Payment component of Chrome (1125614/GHSL-2020-165), a bug that I reported in September 2020 that only affected version 86 of Chrome, which was in beta. I’ll use it to escape the Chrome sandbox to gain privilege of a third party App on Android from a compromised renderer.

In this first episode, I’ll do a brief introduction on how Apache HTTP works, and I’ll give you some insights into custom mutators and how they can be applied to the HTTP protocol effectively.

Last year at GitHub Universe, we introduced the GitHub Security Lab, which is committed to contributing resources, tooling, bounties, and security research to secure the open source ecosystem. We know…

Aimed at developers, in this series we introduce and explore the memory unsafe attack surface of interpreted languages.

This blog describes a security vulnerability in the infrastructure that supports Germany’s COVID-19 contact tracing efforts. The mobile (Android/iOS) apps are not affected by the vulnerability and do not collect and/or transmit any personal data other than the device’s IP address. The infrastructure takes active measures to disassociate true positives from client IP addresses.

Ubuntu 20.04 local privilege escalation using vulnerabilities in gdm3 and accountsservice (CVE-2020-16125, CVE-2020-16126, CVE-2020-16127)

In this post I’ll give details about how to exploit CVE-2020-6449, a use-after-free (UAF) in the WebAudio module of Chrome that I discovered in March 2020. I’ll give an outline of the general strategy to exploit this type of UAF to achieve a sandboxed RCE in Chrome by a single click (and perhaps a 2 minute wait) on a malicious website.

Security is a complex area. One software component may break the assumptions made by another component and it is not always clear who should fix the code to remediate the security implications.

Aimed at developers, in this series we introduce and explore the memory unsafe attack surface of interpreted languages.