Windows MIDI Decoder (QUARTZ.DLL) Heap Corruption
Release Date:
July 23, 2003
Severity:
High (Remote Code Execution)
Systems Affected:
Windows 98
Windows 98 SE
Windows Millennium Edition
Windows NT 4.0
Windows NT 4.0, Terminal Server Edition
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Server 2003
Description:
A little over six hundred years ago, in a quaint German hamlet called
Hamelin, the Pied Piper proved to the townsfolk that he could take control
of their rodents and children with just a song. Turns out the same thing
works on Windows.
Microsoft provides a component called QUARTZ.DLL that allows Windows
applications to play MIDI music through a common interface. Windows Media
Player and Internet Explorer, for example, both use QUARTZ.DLL to play MIDI
music files (.mid extension); in the case of Internet Explorer, MIDI files
can be played automatically when a web page is visited through the use of a
specific HTML tag.
eEye Digital Security has discovered a pair of flaws in all versions of
QUARTZ.DLL that would allow a specially-crafted MIDI file to cause the
execution of arbitrary code when played. In the worst case, an attacker
could construct a malicious .mid file and have it play automatically
whenever a victim attempts to view certain HTML, such as an
attacker-controlled website, resulting in the compromise of the victim's
machine.
Technical Description:
Modern folklore contends that some bands used to inject subliminal messages
into their music by recording spoken commands or phrases and dubbing them
backwards into the track. Although these allegations and the effectiveness
of the technique were never proven conclusively, it is known that computers
running a vulnerable version of QUARTZ.DLL will happily do whatever they're
instructed to do without litigation, as long as the commands in the MIDI
music are in machine language.
The QUARTZ.DLL vulnerability discussed in this advisory is a heap buffer
overrun resulting from an integer overflow. If a Text or Copyright string
with a specified length of FFFFFFFFh is included in the MIDI file, QUARTZ
will attempt to allocate a zero-byte heap block, then copy the text
string -- and any data following it -- to the newly-allocated location in
the heap. As a result, all contiguous pages of heap memory following the
zero-byte block are overwritten until either the source pointer reaches an
invalid page boundary, the destination pointer reaches the end of heap
memory, or another thread is dispatched and faults out trying to use
corrupted heap memory.
The reason this vulnerability exists is because QUARTZ increments the
specified string length (in order to make room for a null terminator)
without checking for a potential overflow condition. The incremented value
(now 0) is passed to LocalAlloc(), which succeeds, while the original value
(FFFFFFFFh) is given to memcpy() to copy the string data from the file image
into the heap buffer.
For the sake of brevity, we have unfortunately omitted the details of the
MIDI file format from this advisory, and will instead skip straight to the
following example of a malicious MIDI:
4D 54 68 64 ; 'MThd' header chunk tag
00 00 00 06 ; size of header chunk data (6)
00 01 ; MIDI file version (1)
00 01 ; number of tracks (1)
65 49 ; pulses per quarter note (PPQN)
4D 54 72 6B ; 'MTrk' track chunk tag
00 00 00 10 ; size of track chunk data (16)
00 ; delta-time for event (0)
FF 02 ; non-MIDI event (Copyright)
8F FF FF FF 7F ; VLQ for text length (FFFFFFFFh)
65 45 79 65 32 30 30 33 ; (start of malicious data)
There are many possible ways to exploit this overflow; the following is a
sampling of instructions at which exceptions were observed in the aftermath
of loading a malicious MIDI in Internet Explorer:
CALL [EAX] ; we control EAX
CALL [EAX+C4h] ; we control EAX
CALL [ECX+0Ch] ; we control ECX
JMP [EAX+28h] ; we control EAX
MOV [ECX], EAX ; we control EAX, ECX
MOV [ESI], ECX ; we control ECX, ESI
Of particular interest are "unlink" sequences such as "MOV [ECX], EAX / MOV
[EAX+4], ECX", which could be used to overwrite the unhandled exception
filter in KERNEL32 during the first instruction, then cause an exception
with the second (for instance, if EAX pointed somewhere into read-only
memory, or if EAX was near a page boundary such that EAX+4..7 landed in an
invalid memory region).
A second heap buffer overrun involving a 16-bit integer overflow and
subsequent memory allocation was also discovered, but to save space we will
only briefly mention it here. The number of tracks in the MThd chunk, a
16-bit field, is subjected to some arithmetic in order to determine the
necessary size for an array of track data structures. In particular, the
size of the block is calculated as:
(number_of_tracks * 24h) + 9E0h
However, the arithmetic is performed entirely in 16 bits, and as a result,
setting the number of tracks to 1751 (6D7h) or greater will cause an
insufficiently small heap block to be allocated. This vulnerability can be
leveraged to overwrite DWORDs in the heap at specific intervals with
arbitrary data. Note that Windows 2003 is not susceptible to this
vulnerability, as it contained a check to ensure that the number of tracks
is never greater than the exact highest value safe for the 16-bit
arithmetic.
Vendor Status:
Microsoft was contacted on April 16, 2003, and has released a patch for this
vulnerability. The patch is available at:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS03-030.asp
This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CAN-2003-0346.
Credit:
Derek Soeder - eEye Digital Security
Greetin's:
6Ds; TJB, JC, MC, JAG, AH, JRJ, SMJ, JM, KP; Uma; and finally, Trust, when
it's not spelled with a $.
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