Windows Access Control Demystified
Hello everybody,
We have constructed a logical model of Windows XP access control, in a
declarative but executable (Datalog) format. We have built a scanner that
reads access-control configuration information from the Windows registry, file
system, and service control manager database, and feeds raw configuration data
to the model. Therefore we can reason about such things as the existence of
privilege-escalation attacks, and indeed we have found several
user-to-administrator vulnerabilities caused by misconfigurations of the
access-control lists of commercial software from several major vendors. We
propose tools such as ours as a vehicle for software developers and system
administrators to model and debug the complex interactions of access control on
installations under Windows.
The full version of the paper can be found at:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~sudhakar/papers/winval.pdf
All the vendors and CERT are aware of this paper. The bugs are *not*
remotely exploitable. The CERT id is VU#953860.
regards,
Sudhakar Govindavajhala and Andrew Appel.
Bio:
Sudhakar Govindavajhala is a finishing PhD student at Computer Science
department, Princeton university. His interests are computer security,
operating systems and networks. Sudhakar is looking for employment
opportunities.
Andrew Appel is a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He is
currently on sabbatcal at INRIA Rocquencourt. His interests are computer
security, compilers, programming languages, type theory, and functional
programming.