Micropatches Released For Windows Error Reporting Service Elevation of Privilege (CVE-2023-36874)

  

With July 2023 Windows Updates, Microsoft brought a fix for CVE-2023-36874, a local privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows Error Reporting Service that was found both by Google TAG and CrowdStrike to be exploited in the wild in the previous month.

When security researcher Filip Dragovic released a proof of concept for this issue, we could reproduce it and start working on a patch.

The Vulnerability

In short, the Windows Error Reporting Service has a number of functions exposed via its RPC interface, so a local process can ask it to submit a chosen error report via function SubmitReport. This function impersonates the calling process' user and at some point launches wermgr.exe, one of the WER executables. Normally, wermgr.exe would be launched from C:\Windows\System32\, but since the service is impersonating the caller (i.e., the attacker), the CreateProcess function honors any symbolic links the caller may have in place. The attacker can, for instance, create a symbolic link mapping C:\ to an arbitrary location such as C:\Users\public\test , which will be used by the CreateProcess call. Consequently, the WER service would launch C:\Users\public\test\Windows\System32\wermgr.exe, attacker's executable with the same name - and according to the documented behavior of CreateProcess, the executable would be launched with the token of the service (not the impersonation token). In other words: as Local System.

 

The Official Patch

Microsoft's fix for this issue was very simple: they effectively disabled the SubmitReport function by immediately returning error "Not implemented" (0x80004001). This means that it is no longer possible to submit an error report via RPC - and perhaps this was never really needed anyway.

Our Micropatch

Our micropatch is logically identical to Microsoft's, and produces the same behavior.

MODULE_PATH "..\AffectedModules\wercplsupport.dll_10.0.17134.1967_Win10-1803_32-bit_u2021-05\wercplsupport.dll"
PATCH_ID 1488
PATCH_FORMAT_VER 2
VULN_ID 7774
PLATFORM win32
       
patchlet_start
    PATCHLET_ID 1
    PATCHLET_TYPE 2
    PATCHLET_OFFSET 0x82ac
    N_ORIGINALBYTES 5
    JUMPOVERBYTES 0
    PIT wercplsupport.dll!0x82eb        
    code_start
        
        mov eax, 80004001h   ; Error code for "Not Implemented"
        jmp PIT_0x82eb       ; Jump directly to end of function
       
    code_end
patchlet_end

 

Let's see our micropatch in action. With 0patch disabled, the POC manages to create a new user "test" on the computer by launching a fake C:\Users\public\test\Windows\System32\wermgr.exe. With 0patch enabled, the POC fails to do that because wermgr.exe is not being launched from function SubmitReport at all.

Micropatch Availability

Micropatches were written for the following security-adopted versions of Windows with all available Windows Updates installed:

1. Windows 10 v21H1 
2. Windows 10 v20H2
   
3. Windows 10 v2004
4. Windows 10 v1909
5. Windows 10 v1809
6. Windows 10 v1803
   

 

We were unable to reproduce this issue on Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, and believe it is not exploitable there.

 

Micropatches have already been distributed to, and applied on, all online 0patch Agents in PRO or Enterprise accounts (unless Enterprise group settings prevent that). 

Vulnerabilities like this one get discovered on a regular basis, and attackers know about them all. If you're using Windows that aren't receiving official security updates anymore, 0patch will make sure these vulnerabilities won't be exploited on your computers - and you won't even have to know or care about these things.

If you're new to 0patch, create a free account in 0patch Central, then install and register 0patch Agent from 0patch.com, and email sales@0patch.com for a trial. Everything else will happen automatically. No computer reboot will be needed.

We would like to thank Filip Dragovic for sharing their proof of concept, which made it possible for us to create a micropatch for this issue.

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