Google releases patches for two high-level security vulnerabilities in Chrome, one of which is still being exploited in the wild

Last week, Google notified its users that the ‘stable channel’ desktop Chrome browser is being updated to version 78.0.3904.87 for Windows, Mac, and Linux and will be rolled out in the coming weeks. This comes after some external researchers found two high severity vulnerabilities in the Chrome web browser.

The first zero-day vulnerability, assigned CVE-2019-13720, was found by two malware researchers Anton Ivanov and Alexey Kulaev from Kaspersky, a private internet security solutions company. This vulnerability is present in Chrome’s PDFium library. Google has confirmed that this vulnerability still “exists in the wild.” The other vulnerability CVE-2019-13721 was found by banananapenguin and affects Chrome's audio component. No exploitation of this vulnerability has been reported so far.

Google has not revealed the technical details of both vulnerabilities. “Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix. We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven’t yet fixed.” Both vulnerabilities are use-after-free vulnerabilities, which means that they have a type of memory flaw that can be leveraged by hackers to execute arbitrary code.

The Kaspersky researchers have named the CVE-2019-13720 vulnerability as Operation WizardOpium, as they have not been able to establish a definitive link of this vulnerability with any known threat actors.

According to Kaspersky, this vulnerability leverages a waterhole-style injection on a Korean-language news portal. This enabled a malicious JavaScript code to be inserted on the main page, which in turn, loads a profiling script from a remote site. The main index page then hosts a small JavaScript tag that loads the remote script. This JavaScript tag checks if the victim’s system can be infected by performing a comparison with the browser’s user agent.

The Kaspersky researchers say, “The exploit used a race condition bug between two threads due to missing proper synchronization between them. It gives an attacker a Use-After-Free (UaF) condition that is very dangerous because it can lead to code execution scenarios, which is exactly what happens in our case.”

The attacker can use this vulnerability to perform numerous operations to allocate/free memory along with other techniques that eventually give the attackers an arbitrary read/write primitive. This technique is used by attackers to create a “special object that can be used with WebAssembly and FileReader together to perform code execution for the embedded shellcode payload.”

You can read Kaspersky detailed report for more information on the zero-day vulnerability.

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