Re: 0day: PDF pwns Windows

Casper.Dik@Sun.COM wrote:
>> But then there is the important concept of the "private 0day", a new
>> vulnerability that a malicious person has but has not used yet.
>>
> But the point is there is no such thing as a 0day *vulnerability"; there's
> a 0day exploit, an exploit in the wild before the vulnerability id
> discovered.
>

An excellent point. Sorry I overlooked that. Exploit development today is so fast that I tend to equate knowledge of a vulnerability with "... and can have an exploit by tomorrow afternoon."

>> Rather, I just treat "0day" as a synonym for "new vulnerability" and
>> don't give a hoot about the alleged intentions of whoever discovered it.
>> What makes it an "0" day is that whoever is announcing it is first to
>> announce it in public. You could only invalidate the 0day claim by
>> showing that the same vulnerability had previously been disclosed by
>> someone else.
>>
> The point is that it is not supposed to be moniker for vulnerabilities;
> it's a moniker for exploits. In any other context it does not make sense.
>
> Specifically considering that "0-day exploit" is the only definition which
> holds meaning with respect to a particular exploit over time. "An exploit
> which existed before the vulnerability was publicly known".
>

Yes, you are right. So "0day" is a class of exploits. Specifically, it is the class of exploits that are developed before the first available patch for the vulnerability in question.

But that race condition of whether the patch or the exploit is partially ordered, because they could be developed independently. There is the special case where the person who first discovered the vulnerability also develops either a patch or an exploit, in which case it is totally ordered. But in the general case where one person discovers the vulnerability, and two other people independently develop an exploit and a patch, you can't tell who finished first. All you can do is detect who published first.

So fair enough, an "0day exploit" is one that appears in public before the associated patch is published.

A "private 0day exploit" (the case I was concerned with) would be where someone develops an exploit, but does not deploy or publish it, holding it in reserve to attack others at the time of their choosing. Presumably if such a person wanted to keep it for very long, they would have to base it on a vulnerability that they themselves discovered, and did not publish.

I continue to dismiss the requirement that an 0day be found maliciously exploiting machines, because that requires inferring intent. IMHO, a POC exploit first posted to Bugtraq ahead of the patch counts as an 0day exploit, unless it has been so thoroughly obfuscated that the "proof" part of "proof of concept" is itself BS.

Crispin

-- 
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.               
http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/
Director of Software Engineering   
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