Researchers Show How To Take Control of Windows 7

alphadogg writes "Security researchers demonstrated how to take control of a computer running Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 operating system at the Hack In The Box Security Conference (HITB) in Dubai on Thursday. Researchers Vipin Kumar and Nitin Kumar used proof-of-concept code they developed, called VBootkit 2.0, to take control of a Windows 7 virtual machine while it was booting up. 'There's no fix for this. It cannot be fixed. It's a design problem,' Vipin Kumar said, explaining the software exploits the Windows 7 assumption that the boot process is safe from attack. While VBootkit 2.0 shows how an attacker can take control of a Windows 7 computer, it's not necessarily a serious threat. For the attack to work, an attacker must have physical access to the victim's computer. The attack can not be done remotely." Which makes me wonder why I'm posting this :)

Comments

Attack requires editing RAM contents during boot

[Sockatume]

The attack involves patching particular Windows system files in RAM during the boot process, which explains why physical access is required, and why it doesn't work after a reboot. The attacker loads an app from a CD-ROM which then itself executes the normal Windows boot process while agressively patching software in memory. This also isn't a windows-specific vulnerability: any OS which does not checksum memory contents each time they're read is vulnerable.

Why you are posting this

[DaveV1.0]

Because you are a Microsoft hating troll

Re:Boot from Live CD?

[Alsee]

It's a 'vulnerability' in the sense that the idiots at Microsoft came up with this Trusted Computing notion that the computer is supposed to be secured against the owner'.

Trusted Computing, Digital Rights Management, the new Windows model for the operating system, it is considered a 'vulnerability' if the owner is able to take control of his own computer. Of course the Trusted Computing party line, and the way this article was written, is to to call this anti-owner system a "security" system and to spin any attack on it as evil, but as virtually everyone here has already commented, this issue is about 'attacking' and gaining control over a computer you already physically control. And in general what 'attacker' already has physical control of the computer? The owner. An owner-attacker who wants to control his own computer, and override DRM or Trusted Computing lockouts against the owner. The entire new Windows driver model is that the owner is forbidden to run unapproved drivers, because such drivers could be used to break DRM or gain control of other Trusted Windows systems. If/when Windows does permit you to run unapproved drivers, it dumps you down into an unTrusted unprivileged state. As I recall, Windows Vista even locks you out of the entire Aero mode Aero interface if you try to load an unapproved driver.

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Re:I cannot believe it...

[SanityInAnarchy]

I'll correct you a bit further -- there are different kinds of physical access. For instance, a public computer lab might have machines which have their case locked, both to prevent it from being opened and to prevent it from being locked down, BIOS locked and configured to boot only from hard disk, bootloader locked, etc.

On such a machine, there's really not a lot you can do to compromise it without some sort of actual software vulnerability or misconfiguration. You might be able to add a physical keylogger -- maybe -- depends how kiosk-ified it is.

However, this does not appear to be such an attack. Rather, it seems this is an attack which requires you to boot the machine off of some other media. Most machines are wide open to this in many ways -- the more frightening one was PXE; just plug a laptop into the same network and own every machine as it boots.

But Vista is not unique in this respect, and I cannot imagine how an OS could protect itself against such an attack. And even network boots can be secured, if you can add just a kernel and initrd to local storage.