Full Disclosure mailing list archives

Re: Microsoft Windows XP/2003/Vista memory corruption 0day


From: "Michele Cicciotti" <mc () khamsa net>
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 01:58:19 +0100

Holy mackerel! Instances of this bug date back to 1999!

Different bug. That appears to be a trivial exhaustion of CSRSS worker threads through indiscriminate calls to 
MessageBox+MB_SERVICE_NOTIFICATION, which causes a DoS as no threads are available to serve kernel-mode requests from 
win32k, stalling GUI processes. I have done my fair share of CSRSS reversing in my better days, and I'm pretty sure 
that in Windows 2000 and later, a dedicated thread is used for such notifications, not just any thread, any time. 
Easily verifiable with local net sends and Spy++. It wasn't a "bug" either, more like a serious design flaw that 
ignored a very basic Win32 mantra ("don't do GUI in a worker thread") - not at all like this double-free


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