CVE-2015-2482 MSIE 8 jscript RegExpBase::FBadHeader use-after-free details

[Berend-Jan Wever <berendj () nwever nl>]

Throughout November, I plan to release details on vulnerabilities I
found in web-browsers which I've not released before. This is the
twelfth entry in that series. Unfortunately I won't be able to publish
everything within one month at the current rate, so I may continue to
publish these through December and January.

The below information is available in more detail on my blog at
http://blog.skylined.nl/20161116001.html.

Follow me on http://twitter.com/berendjanwever for daily browser bugs.

MSIE 8 jscript RegExpBase::FBadHeader use-after-free
====================================================
(MS15-018, CVE-2015-2482)

Synopsis
--------
A specially crafted web-page can cause the Javascript engine of
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 to free memory used for a string. The code
will keep a reference to the string and can be forced to reuse it when
compiling a regular expression.

Known affected software, attack vectors and mitigations
-------------------------------------------------------
* Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
  An attacker would need to get a target user to open a specially
  crafted web-page. Disabling Javascript should prevent an attacker
  from triggering the vulnerable code path.

Description
-----------
Recompiling the regular expression pattern during a replace can cause
the code to reuse a freed string, but only if the string is freed from
the cache by allocating and freeing a number of strings of certain size,
as explained by Alexander Sotirov in his Heap Feng-Shui presentation.

Exploit
-------
Exploitation was not investigated.

Time-line
---------
* *March 2015*: This vulnerability was found through fuzzing.
* *March 2015*: This vulnerability was submitted to ZDI.
* *April 2015*: This vulnerability was acquired by ZDI.
* *October 2015*: Microsoft addressed this issue in MS15-018.
* *November 2016*: Details of this issue are released.

Cheers,

SkyLined

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