New Google Chrome Zero-Day Vulnerability Found Actively Exploited in the Wild

Mar 6, 2019

You must update your Google Chrome immediately to the latest
version of the web browsing application.

Security researcher Clement Lecigne of Google’s Threat
Analysis Group discovered and reported a high severity
vulnerability in Chrome late last month that could allow remote
attackers to execute arbitrary code and take full control of the
computers.

The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-5786,
affects the web browsing software for all major operating systems
including Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, and Linux.
^[1]

Without revealing technical details of the vulnerability, the
Chrome security team only says the issue is a use-after-free
vulnerability in the FileReader component of the Chrome browser,
which leads to remote code execution attacks.

What’s more worrisome? Google warned that this zero-day RCE
vulnerability is actively being exploited in the wild by attackers
to target Chrome users.

“Access to bug details and links may be kept
restricted ^[2] until a majority of
users are updated with a fix,” the Chrome security
team notes ^[3]. “We will also retain
restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other
projects similarly depend on, but haven’t yet fixed.”

FileReader is a standard API that has been designed to allow web
applications to asynchronously read the contents of files (or raw
data buffers) stored on a user’s computer, using ‘File’ or ‘Blob’
objects to specify the file or data to read.

The use-after-free vulnerability is a class of memory
corruption bug that allows corruption or modification of data in
memory, enabling an unprivileged user to escalate privileges on an
affected system or software.
The use-after-free vulnerability in the FileReader component could
enable unprivileged attackers to gain privileges on the Chrome web
browser, allowing them to escape sandbox protections and run
arbitrary code on the targeted system.

It appears to exploit this vulnerability, all an attacker needs
to do is tricking victims into just opening, or redirecting them
to, a specially-crafted webpage without requiring any further
interaction.

The patch for the security vulnerability has already been rolled
out to its users in a stable Chrome update 72.0.3626.121 for
Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, which users may have
already receive or will soon receive in coming days.

So, make sure your system is running the updated version of the
Chrome web browser.

We will update the article, as soon as Google releases technical
details of this vulnerability.

References

^{^}
CVE-2019-5786
(cve.mitre.org)
^{^}
kept restricted
(bugs.chromium.org)
^{^}
notes
(chromereleases.googleblog.com)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

New Google Chrome Zero-Day Vulnerability Found Actively Exploited in the Wild

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