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Shattering Windows

Posted by timothy on from the fundamentalism dept.

ChrisPaget writes: "I've just released a paper documenting and exploiting fundamental flaws in the Win32 API. Essentially, they allow you to take control of any window on your desktop, regardless of whether that window is running as you, localsystem, or anywhere in between. The technique has been discussed before, but AFAIK this is the first working exploit. Oh, did I mention it's unfixable?" You may want to read this CNET interview with Microsoft security head Scott Charney to learn even more about "trustworthy computing."

1 of 772 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Don't Do That by ChrisPaget · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, probably not - I researched this when writing Shatter. When you hit CTRL+ALT+DEL you actually switch desktops from the "Default" desktop to the "Winlogon" desktop. A program on one cannot interact with a program on another. There are functions to "open" a desktop and interact with it - however the Winlogon desktop is tightly restricted, and any attempts to open it are met with an Access Denied error.

    Either way, there's numerous windows (normally hidden) on a standard desktop that run as localsystem - it's possible to exploit some of them using the same techniques.