Privilege escalation in NetBSD - CVE-2012-0217

Vulnerability details

The vulnerability allows a local user to escalate privileges on the system.

The vulnerability exists due to Intel processors sysret to non-canonical address behavior. This is a vulnerability following from a difference of behaviour of sysret in Intel's version of the amd64 architecture, em64t.

System calls may be implemented as using the em64t syscall/sysret instruction pair.

syscall saves the context of the calling unprivileged process before executing a system call in kernel mode; sysret restores it and resumes ordinary operations in user mode.

In the Intel implementation of sysret, if you have invalid information about the "next instruction" address in your saved context, the sysret instruction will trigger a trap in kernel space. However the sysret instruction is executed with the user stack pointer already loaded, so the kernel fault frame is written to the user stack. The kernel is unable to safely recover from this, so must ensure that the trap doesn't happen.

If your invalid "next instruction" address is in kernel space or in user space (and in the latter case, not where your program is) the program will segfault or execute attacker controlled code. If it is in the gap between user space and kernel space, the CPU will reset, except if someone managed to seed the address location with a valid instruction.

Successful exploitation of the vulnerability may allow an attacker to gain root access to the affected system.

Affected software

How to mitigate CVE-2012-0217

The fix in the following versions will disallow sysret to
an invalid address.

src/sys/arch/amd64/amd64/machdep.c
HEAD 1.184
netbsd-6 1.175.2.6
netbsd-5 1.102.4.14
netbsd-5-1 1.102.4.13.2.1
netbsd-5-0 1.102.4.10.2.2
netbsd-4 1.44.2.7
netbsd-4-0 1.44.2.3.6.1

src/sys/arch/amd64/amd64/netbsd32_machdep.c
HEAD 1.77
netbsd-6 1.74.10.2
netbsd-5 1.55.4.4
netbsd-5-1 1.55.4.3.2.1
netbsd-5-0 1.55.6.3
netbsd-4 1.30.2.4
netbsd-4-0 1.30.2.1.6.1

Links to Public Exploits and PoC-codes

• Exploit #6085 - FreeBSD - Intel SYSRET Privilege Escalation (Metasploit) (June 17, 2021)
• Exploit #1302 - FreeBSD 9.0 - Intel SYSRET Kernel Privilege Escalation (March 18, 2020)
• Exploit #1303 - Microsoft Windows Kernel - Intel x64 SYSRET (MS12-042) (PoC) (March 18, 2020)
• Exploit #1575 - FreeBSD Intel SYSRET Privilege Escalation (March 18, 2020)

External References

• http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/security/advisories/NetBSD-SA2012-003.txt.asc

Related Security Bulletins

• Privilege escalation in NetBSD
• Debian update for kfreebsd-8
• Privilege escalation in xen (Alpine package)
• SUSE Linux update for Xen
• Gentoo update for Xen