tzwlhack/cve-2021-21017Proof-of-concept exploit for CVE-2021-21017, an Adobe Reader type confusion leading to out-of-bounds read and heap overflow, with technical analysis and detection guidance.
# IA32 plugin, ver. 2020.013.20074.
char * __cdecl FUN_2581894c(char *base_url,LPCSTR rel_url)
{
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if ((base_url != (char *)0x0) && (rel_url != (LPCSTR)0x0)) {
if ((*base_url == -2) && (base_url[1] == -1)) {
iVar6 = bytes_len(base_url);
pcVar7 = base_url + iVar6;
pcVar8 = rel_url + 2;
do {
do {
cVar3 = *pcVar8;
pcVar1 = pcVar8 + 2;
*pcVar7 = cVar3;
pcVar2 = pcVar7 + 2;
cVar4 = pcVar8[1];
pcVar7[1] = cVar4;
pcVar7 = pcVar2;
pcVar8 = pcVar1;
} while (cVar3 != '\0');
} while (cVar4 != '\0');
}
else {
lstrcatA(base_url,rel_url);
}
return base_url;
}
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}
When building an absolute URL from one relative to a PDF document's baseURL to be used by APIs like: app.launchURL, document.submitForm or app.media.createPlayer,
if the the baseURL looks to be a UTF-16BE string, the relative one is also treated as a UTF-16BE string when performing the concatenation, though it is actually an ANSI string.
This may result in Out-of-bounds read access on one hand. On the other hand, when allocating memory to hold the destination buffer, the relative URL is "measured" as an ANSI string. This is of course not enough if OOB read occurs. (string + the NULL terminator filling a whole heap chunk).
What does this mean?
It will most often result in a crash and occasionally in overwriting an ArrayBuffer's byteLength to 0xFF.
If you have questions feel free to contact me on twitter: https://twitter.com/Zeusb0x
The PDF document catalog will have an URI entry holding an indirect reference to a dictionary object. This in turn will have a Base entry, which is the actual baseURL. It will be most likely be present in hexadecimal notation and will start with the characters \xFE\xFF. (see PoC). Fortunately this is the only way to change a documents's baseURL in a normal, non-privileged context. Trying to do it from JavaScript will throw a security exception.