XP security hole that even a 5 year old could exploit

I learned of this at another site and thought I would share it here. Turn down your volume if you play the animation at work. I imagine people are working overtime in Redmond right now to make a patch for this.

http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?compare=1&storyid=1542

XP local privilege escalation demonstrated (NEW)
Changes between the current version and version 1 are highlighted.
Published: 2006-08-03,
Last Updated: 2006-08-03 12:59:40 UTC by Arrigo Triulzi (Version: 2)

An excellent Flash animation showing the latest XP local privilege escalation has been published and it clearly demonstrates how trivial it is to "upgrade" from a user with administrative privileges to SYSTEM (the same but for unprivileged users is currently disputed, more at the CVE entry covering the issue and on the Bugtraq archives).

How does it work?

It is actually quite simple: normally a scheduler is used for running non-interactive programs unattended, for example anti-virus updates (in the "baddies" world it is used for scheduling netcat backdoors but this is hardly "normal usage").

In this example the user decides to schedule running "cmd.exe" (the Windows command line prompt) rather than a non-interactive program. When the scheduler triggers it starts cmd.exe which opens a new command-line window.

The problem is that the scheduler runs as the "SYSTEM" user which under Windows is an all-powerful user used for system tasks (the Windows equivalent of "root" under Unix) and, as this video demonstrate, it does not "drop privileges" (that is to say: "take on the privileges of the user requesting the scheduled job") before running the command.

When the command is finally run at the specified time it therefore hands you a command line prompt with SYSTEM privileges.

Is there a fix? Or indeed, why is this a problem? Well, the fix would be to stop the scheduler which breaks lots of other things (e.g. anti-virus updates) but which an adminstrator can easily restart... Now, is it really a problem since an administrator doesn't gain much? Well, it should not be the case that running a scheduled job lands you different privileges by default and, of course, should it turn out that administrative privileges are not needed then it becomes a far bigger issue as any user could gain SYSTEM privileges.

Important note: do not watch this at work with your loudspeakers turned on (bad language disclaimer...). Headphones strongly recommended.

Thanks for posting this! Microsoft needs to look at this asap.

I never have scheduler running and it stops nothing else from functioning as it should.

The problem is not that this is a bug - this is a documented feature that has been in NT for many years. Stupid design, yes - tantamount to leaving the keys in the car and the door unlocked - but properly documented and has been a documented way of getting system access for quite a while.

I have been using it for a while to combat viruses and such - a lot of malware installs itself as SYSTEM and cannot be removed by software at administrator level (SYSTEM is greater than administrator).

On the machines I administer, the users run as Limited Users (Users under 2000) and all abilities about running a scheduled service and so forth are reserved for the Administrator class (local policies, that sort of thing). This means that this trick does not work on a properly secured machine.