Attacker Value
High
(1 user assessed)
Exploitability
Moderate
(1 user assessed)
User Interaction
None
Privileges Required
Low
Attack Vector
Local
4

CVE-2022-21919

Disclosure Date: January 11, 2022
Exploited in the Wild
Add MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques that apply to this CVE.

Description

Windows User Profile Service Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability

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2
Ratings
Technical Analysis

Update: As predicted there is a patch bypass for this, now labled as CVE-2022-26904

According to https://twitter.com/KLINIX5/status/1480996599165763587 this appears to be a patch for the code blogged about at https://halove23.blogspot.com/2021/10/windows-user-profile-service-0day.html. The details on this bug can be found at https://github.com/klinix5/ProfSvcLPE/blob/main/write-up.docx but I’ll summarize them here for brevity.

The original incomplete patch, aka CVE-2021-34484 is explained best by Mitja Kolsek at https://blog.0patch.com/2021/11/micropatching-incompletely-patched.html where he notes that bug was originally considered to be an arbitrary directory deletion bug that allowed a logged on user to delete a folder on the computer.

However upon reviewing the fix KLINUX5 found that it was possible to not only bypass the fix, but also make the vulnerability more impactful.

Specifically by abusing the User Profile Service’s code which creates a temporary user profile folder (to protect against the original user profile folder being damaged etc), and then copies folders and files from the original profile folder to the backup, one can instead place a symbolic link. When this symbolic link is followed, it can allow the attacker to create attacker-writeable folders in a protected location and then perform a DLL hijacking attack against high privileged system processes.

Unfortunately when patching this bug, Microsoft correctly assumed that one should check that the temporary user folder (aka C:\Users\TEMP), is not a symbolic link, but didn’t check to see if any of the folders under C:\Users\TEMP contains a symbolic link.

Note that as noted in https://blog.0patch.com/2021/11/micropatching-incompletely-patched.html this bug does require winning a race condition so exploitation is 100% reliable however there are ways to win the race condition as was shown in the code for the patch bypass published at https://github.com/klinix5/ProfSvcLPE/tree/main/DoubleJunctionEoP.

I’d keep an eye on this one as KLINIX5 has a habit of finding patch bypasses for his bugs and if he says Microsoft has messed things up again, more than likely there will be another patch bypass for this bug. I’m still looking into exactly what was patched here though.

CVSS V3 Severity and Metrics
Base Score:
7.0 High
Impact Score:
5.9
Exploitability Score:
1
Vector:
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Attack Vector (AV):
Local
Attack Complexity (AC):
High
Privileges Required (PR):
Low
User Interaction (UI):
None
Scope (S):
Unchanged
Confidentiality (C):
High
Integrity (I):
High
Availability (A):
High

General Information

Vendors

  • microsoft

Products

  • windows 10 1507,
  • windows 10 1607,
  • windows 10 1809,
  • windows 10 1909,
  • windows 10 20h2,
  • windows 10 21h1,
  • windows 10 21h2,
  • windows 11 21h2,
  • windows 7 -,
  • windows 8.1 -,
  • windows rt 8.1 -,
  • windows server 2008 -,
  • windows server 2008 r2,
  • windows server 2012 -,
  • windows server 2012 r2,
  • windows server 2016,
  • windows server 2019,
  • windows server 2022,
  • windows server 20h2

Exploited in the Wild

Reported by:

Additional Info

Technical Analysis