A headline feature introduced in the latest release of Windows 11, 25H2 is Administrator Protection. The goal of this feature is to replace User Account Control (UAC) with a more robust and importantly, securable system to allow a local user to access administrator privileges only when necessary. This blog …
While our previous two blog posts provided technical recommendations for increasing the effort required by attackers to develop 0-click exploit chains, our experience finding, reporting and exploiting these vulnerabilities highlighted some broader issues in the Android ecosystem. This post describes the problems we encountered and recommendations for improvement. Audio …
With the advent of a potential Dolby Unified Decoder RCE exploit, it seemed prudent to see what kind of Linux kernel drivers might be accessible from the resulting userland context, the mediacodec context. As per the AOSP documentation, the mediacodec SELinux context is intended to be a constrained (a …
Over the past few years, several AI-powered features have been added to mobile phones that allow users to better search and understand their messages. One effect of this change is increased 0-click attack surface, as efficient analysis often requires message media to be decoded before the message is opened …
While on Project Zero, we aim for our research to be leading-edge, our blog design was... not so much. We welcome readers to our shiny new blog! For the occasion, we asked members of Project Zero to dust off old blog posts that never quite saw the light of …
Preface Hello from the future! This is a blogpost I originally drafted in early 2017. I wrote what I intended to be the first half of this post (about escaping from the VM to the VirtualBox host userspace process with CVE-2017-3558 ), but I never got around to writing the …
This post was originally written in 2016 for the Project Zero blog. However, in the end it was published separately in the journal PoC||GTFO issue #13 as well as in the second volume of the printed version. In honor of our new blog we’re republishing it on …
Posted by Benoît Sevens, Google Threat Intelligence Group Introduction Between July 2024 and February 2025, 6 suspicious image files were uploaded to VirusTotal. Thanks to a lead from Meta, these samples came to the attention of Google Threat Intelligence Group. Investigation of these images showed that these images were …
Posted by Seth Jenkins, Project Zero Introduction I've recently been researching Pixel kernel exploitation and as part of this research I found myself with an excellent arbitrary write primitive...but without a KASLR leak. As necessity is the mother of all invention, on a hunch, I started researching the …
Posted by Jann Horn, Google Project Zero Introduction Some time in 2024, during a Project Zero team discussion, we were talking about how remote ASLR leaks would be helpful or necessary for exploiting some types of memory corruption bugs, specifically in the context of Apple devices. Coming from the …
Posted by Jann Horn, Google Project Zero Introduction In early June, I was reviewing a new Linux kernel feature when I learned about the MSG_OOB feature supported by stream-oriented UNIX domain sockets. I reviewed the implementation of MSG_OOB, and discovered a security bug (CVE-2025-38236) affecting Linux >=6.9. I …
Posted by Tim Willis, Google Project Zero In 2021, we updated our vulnerability disclosure policy to the current "90+30" model. Our goals were to drive faster yet thorough patch development, and improve patch adoption. While we’ve seen progress, a significant challenge remains: the time it takes for …
Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk, Google Project Zero In the previous blog post, we focused on the general security analysis of the registry and how to effectively approach finding vulnerabilities in it. Here, we will direct our attention to the exploitation of hive-based memory corruption bugs, i.e., those that …
Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk, Google Project Zero In the first three blog posts of this series, I sought to outline what the Windows Registry actually is, its role, history, and where to find further information about it. In the subsequent three posts, my goal was to describe in detail …
Guest post by Dillon Franke, Senior Security Engineer, 20% time on Project Zero Every second, highly-privileged MacOS system daemons accept and process hundreds of IPC messages. In some cases, these message handlers accept data from sandboxed or unprivileged processes. In this blog post, I’ll explore using Mach IPC …
Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk, Google Project Zero Welcome back to the Windows Registry Adventure! In the previous installment of the series, we took a deep look into the internals of the regf hive format. Understanding this foundational aspect of the registry is crucial, as it illuminates the design principles …
An analysis of the NSO BLASTPASS iMessage exploit Posted by Ian Beer, Google Project Zero On September 7, 2023 Apple issued an out-of-band security update for iOS: Around the same time on September 7th 2023, Citizen Lab published a blog post linking the two CVEs fixed in iOS 16 …
Posted by James Forshaw, Google Project Zero Object orientated remoting technologies such as DCOM and.NET Remoting make it very easy to develop an object-orientated interface to a service which can cross process and security boundaries. This is because they're designed to support a wide range of objects, not …
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 …