Ex-MS staffer to demo Vista smart card hack
Hot Fuzz
Posted in Enterprise Security, 18th March 2008 11:38 GMT
Free whitepaper – Solid State Drives and High-Speed Memory
A former Microsoft worker has identified security vulnerabilities in smart card plug-in software for Windows Vista that might allow hackers to take over vulnerable PCs.
Dan Griffin used a fuzzing tool he developed, dubbed SCardFuzz, to find bugs in software from an unnamed smart card vendor. Griffin, who left Redmond's smart card development team to work for small Seattle-based security consultancy JW Secure, plans to demo the hack (which he claims might allow attackers to gain full system access) at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver at the end of March.
A Java applet supplied by the unnamed vendor allows programs to be created. These might be potentially malicious. "Writing a hacker applet on the card is not that hard or far-fetched," Griffin told Dark Reading.
The SCardFuzz tool creates an applet on smart cards that generates a stream of fake and jumbled data. This malformed data is used to probe Microsoft's Smart Card Minidriver interface for problems.
SCardFuzz creates a heap-based buffer overflow in the unnamed vendor’s plug-in for Microsoft Vista, allowing hackers to crash or take control of vulnerable PCs. "You insert it into a reader on an unattended machine ... And you can take out a system process and at best, make it crash, or at worst, take over that process and control it," Griffin explained.
The same attack methodology ought to work under Windows XP, Heise security reports. ®
Free whitepaper – Ensuring service assurance in the new normal
The Register Guide to Extended Validation
The Evolving Security Landscape
The Impact of IT Security Attitudes
Risk and Resilience
Linux on the Desktop
