James Forshaw

Workshop Title

Introduction to Logical Windows Privilege Escalation

Abstract

More and more code running on Windows is done inside sandboxes or as non-administrators. This makes privilege escalation more important than ever. Memory corruptions are a common way of gaining higher privileges but Windows has been introducing more mitigations making exploitation harder. Logical vulnerabilities on the other hand are typically not affected by mitigations such as ASLR or DEP, but they’re generally more difficult to find. As an added complication they cannot be easily discovered through typical fuzzing approaches. This 2hr workshop will go through an introduction to finding and exploiting these logical privilege escalation vulnerabilities on Windows.

Speaker Bio

James is a security researcher in Google’s Project Zero. He has been involved with computer hardware and software security for over 10 years looking at a range of different platforms and applications. With a great interest in logical vulnerabilities he’s been listed as the #1 researcher for MSRC, as well as being a Pwn2Own and Microsoft Mitigation Bypass bounty winner. He has spoken at a number of security conferences including Black Hat USA, CanSecWest, Bluehat, HITB, and Infiltrate.