Windows Exploitation Tricks: Trapping Virtual Memory Access (2025 Update)
Posted by James Forshaw, Google Project Zero Back in 2021 I wrote a blog post about various ways you can build a virtual memory access trap primitive on Windows. The goal was to cause a reader or writer of a virtual memory address to halt for a significant (e.g. 1 or more seconds) amount of time, generally for the purpose of exploiting TOCTOU memory access bugs in the kernel. The solutions proposed in the blog post were to either map an SMB file on a remote server, or abuse the Cloud Filter API. This blog isn't going to provide new [...]