The Windows Registry Adventure #1: Introduction and research results
Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk, Google Project Zero In the 20-month period between May 2022 and December 2023, I thoroughly audited the Windows Registry in search of local privilege escalation bugs. It all started unexpectedly: I was in the process of developing a coverage-based Windows kernel fuzzer based on the Bochs x86 emulator (one of my favorite tools for security research: see Bochspwn, Bochspwn Reloaded, and my earlier font fuzzing infrastructure ), and needed some binary formats to test it on. My first pick were PE files: they are very popular in the Windows environment, which makes it easy to create [...]