Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk, Google Project Zero When tackling a new vulnerability research target, especially a closed-source one, I prioritize gathering as much information about it as possible. This gets especially interesting when it's a subsystem as old and fundamental...

Posted by Sergei Glazunov and Mark Brand, Google Project Zero Introduction At Project Zero, we constantly seek to expand the scope and effectiveness of our vulnerability research. Though much of our work still relies on traditional methods like manual source code audits and reverse engineering, we're always looking for new approaches. As the...

Posted by Seth Jenkins, Google Project ZeroIntroduction Android's open-source ecosystem has led to an incredible diversity of manufacturers and vendors developing software that runs on a broad variety of hardware. This hardware requires supporting drivers, meaning that many different codebases carry the potential to compromise a significant segment...

Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk, Google Project Zero Before diving into the low-level security aspects of the registry, it is important to understand its role in the operating system and a bit of history behind it. In essence, the registry is a hierarchical database made of named "keys" and "values", used by Windows and applications to store a variety...

Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk, Google Project Zero In the 20-month period between May 2022 and December 2023, I thoroughly audited the Windows Registry in search of local privilege escalation bugs. It all started unexpectedly: I was in the process of developing a coverage-based Windows kernel fuzzer based on the Bochs x86 emulator (one of my favorite...