Vulnerability research

Dedicated to advancing the understanding and detection of software vulnerabilities—and explaining the latest vulnerability research from the GitHub Security Lab. Go behind the scenes with the GitHub Security Lab, a collaborative initiative that brings together security researchers, developers, and organizations to find and fix security vulnerabilities in open source software.

One day short of a full chain: Part 1 – Android Kernel arbitrary code execution

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.

One day short of a full chain: Part 2 – Chrome sandbox escape

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.

Securing the fight against COVID-19 through open source

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.

Exploiting a textbook use-after-free security vulnerability in Chrome

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.

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