by rfoo | 2025-04-01 08:21:31+00:00
All good questions.

> is not modifying those code to use STL containers much cheaper

That's right. However, I'd add that most exploited bugs these days (in high-profile targets) are temporal memory safety (i.e. lifetime) bugs. The remaining spatial (out of bound) bugs are mostly in long forgotten dependencies.

> Are you referring to the idea of shadow stacks in general or a particular implementation of them?

The idea. Shadow stack (assuming perfect hardware assisted implementation) is a good backward-edge control flow integrity idea, and ruins one of the common ways to take over $rip (write a ROP chain to stack), but that's it. Besides making exploitation harder, both forward-edge and backward-edge CFI also kill some bugs. However, IMO we are long past non-linear stack buffer overflow days, once in a while there may still be news about one, but it could be news because it is an outlier. Hence, compared to CFI, the bugs shadow stack kills are pretty irrelevant now.

> JIT bugs leading to arbitrary script execution in JS engines

Not necessarily JIT bugs. Could also be an UAF and people went a bloody path to convert it to an `ArrayBuffer` with base address = 0 and size = 0x7FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF accessible from JavaScript. Chrome killed this specific primitive. But there's more, I'm not going to talk about them here.

You may have a slight confusion here. In case of browser renderer, people starts with arbitrary JavaScript execution, the goal here is to do what JavaScript (on this page!) can't do, via memory corruption - including, but not limited to executing arbitrary native code. For example, for a few years, being able to access Chrome-specific JS APIs to send arbitrary IPC message to browser process (out of renderer sandbox), is one `bool` flag on .bss away from JavaScript. If we managed to get arbitrary R/W (that is, can read / write all memory within the renderer process, within JavaScript, see my ArrayBuffer example above), we just change it and run our sandbox escape against browser process in JavaScript, who needs that native code execution?

Or, if you do want native code execution. For a few years in V8 the native code WASM gets compiled to, is RWX in memory, so you just use your arb R/W to write that. You can kill that too, but then people starts coming up with bizarre tricks like overwriting your WASM code cache when you load it from disk and before making it R/X, and there're enough fishes in the pool that you likely can't patch em'all.

> I mean, if you are after RCEs, don't CFI and shadow stacks halt the program instead of letting the CPU jumping to the injected code?

Yeah. But as I said, nowadays people usually use temporal memory safety bugs, and they want arbitrary R/W before they attempt to take over $rip. Don't get me wrong, this is because of the success of CFI and similar mitigations! So they did work, they just can't stop people from popping your phones.

> can you name one widespread C++ exploit that:

I just google'd "Chrome in the wild UAF" and casually found this in the first page: https://securelist.com/the-zero-day-exploits-of-operation-wi...

I assume "in the wild exploited" fits your "widespread" requirement.

Granted, it's five years old, but if you are okay with non-ITW bugs I can come up with a lot of more recent ones (in my mind).

This is an UAF. So it would not have happened in a memory safe language. While back then the exploited chrome.exe may not have enabled CFG (it was enabled late 2021 IIRC), I don't see how the exploit path could be blocked by CFI.