The 2016 Pwnie Nominee For Most Innovative Research

Exceptions in Exceptions – Abusing Special Cases in System Exception Handling to Achieve Unbelievable Vulnerability Exploitation

Credit: Yang Yu (@tombkeeper)

Memory Read / Write / Execute attributes are one of the most important part of system security. Usually it is mandatory to have writable attribute set before overwriting a block of memory, and executable attribute set before executing code in a block of memory, otherwise an exception is generated. However, there are some special cases in the Windows exception handling procedure that we can take advantage of. By abusing such exceptions, we could write to the unwritable, and execute the unexecutable.

Exceptions in Exceptions – Abusing Special Cases in System Exception Handling to Achieve Unbelievable Vulnerability Exploitation