Exploit_Mitigations : Knowledge Base Of Exploit Mitigations Available Across Numerous Operating Systems, Architectures And Applications And Versions

Exploit_Mitigations goal is to list mitigations added over time in various operating systems, software, libraries or hardware. It becomes handy to know if a given vulnerability is easily exploitable or not depending on exploitation mitigations in place.

An example is the following:

Supported Targets

We currently support the following operating systems:

• Microsoft Windows
• Linux
• Google Android
• Apple iPhone OS (iOS)
• OpenBSD
• FreeBSD

and the following software:

• Mozilla Firefox
• Microsoft Edge
• Google Chrome
• Microsoft Office

and the following libraries:

• glibc

and the following hardware:

• ARM

Motivations

It has become challenging to follow when certain mitigations are added in an update and/or backported to some older versions of various software and hardware.

Sometimes, online content becomes deprecated due to mitigation changes and it can be hard to keep up. Also, it is easy to forget after a short time if you don’t work on a specific software/hardware.

We have been filling this gap by tracking all the mitigations in summary tables that hold the mitigations names and linking to online references to get technical information about them.

The shared information has demonstrated to be useful for several years to exploit developers.

Does My Current Environment Have Mitigation X?

This is a common question any exploit developer may have when trying to develop an exploit for a given target.

E.g. let’s say you want to exploit a Windows kernel driver on Windows 7 x64 containing a kernel NULL pointer dereference bug. Is it exploitable?

Checking our table, we read the “NULL page mitigation” was introduced in “Windows 8 32-bit/64-bit and backported to Vista+ 64-bit”. Now we know it depends if our target Windows 7 x64 is up-to-date or not, more precisely, we can focus on figuring out which KB introduces this mitigation and check our target against that KB.