Lenovo System Interface Foundation - DLL Preloading and Potential Abuses (CVE-2019-6189)
Vulnerability Disclosures
SafeBreach Labs discovered a new vulnerability in Lenovo System Interface Foundation service, which is preinstalled on Lenovo PCs.
In this post, we will demonstrate how the CVE-2019-6189 vulnerability could have been used in order to achieve defense evasion and persistence by loading an arbitrary unsigned DLL into a signed process that runs as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM.
Note: In order to exploit this vulnerability the attacker needs to have Administrator privileges.
Lenovo System Interface Foundation is a necessary component of the following Universal Windows Platform applications:
The component is preinstalled on Windows-based Lenovo PCs.
In our exploration, we targeted the Lenovo System Interface Foundation service.
In addition to the fact that it is a signed process that runs as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM, this service was interesting because it is preinstalled on Windows-based Lenovo PCs. This vulnerability, preinstalled in many units, could have a widespread impact, with serious consequences for thousands of users.
After the Lenovo System Interface Foundation service started, it executed Lenovo.Modern.ImController.PluginHost.Device.exe as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM.
Once executed, the process tried to load Wintrust.dll from its own directory, instead of SysWOW64:
The service then tried to load a missing DLL file (
Wintrust.dll
)
In order to test this vulnerability, we compiled an x86 arbitrary DLL which writes the following to the filename of a txt file:
We then placed it in the following path and restarted the computer:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Lenovo\ImController\PluginHost\wintrust.dll
We were able to load an arbitrary DLL and execute our code within Lenovo.Modern.ImController.PluginHost.Device exe which was signed by “Lenovo Group Ltd.” and run as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM.
In order to analyze this one, we used dnSpy, because the vulnerable executable is based on .NET.
In order to verify the certificate of different binaries (for example, to load only trusted libraries), the Lenovo.Modern.ImController.PluginHost.Device.exe process uses the WinVerifyTrust WinAPI function.
The implementation can be found in the Lenovo.Modern.Utilities.dll (a shared framework for Lenovo Binaries), inside the Lenovo.Modern.Utilities.Services.Validation.Tvt.WinVerifyTrustTools class.
It uses the DllImport attribute to load the Wintrust.dll unmanaged DLL:
There are two root causes for this vulnerability:
The code didn’t use the DefaultDllImportSearchPathsAttribute attribute with the System32 value of the DllImportSearchPath enum, so it tried to look for the library first in the CWD of the application, instead of loading it directly from SysWOW64.
Below we show three possible ways that an attacker could have leveraged the CVE-2019-6189 vulnerability which we discovered and documented above.
The vulnerability gave attackers the ability to load and execute malicious payloads within the context of a Lenovo signed process. This ability might have been abused by an attacker for different purposes such as execution and evasion, for example: Application Whitelisting Bypass.
The vulnerability gave an attacker the ability to load and execute malicious payloads in a persistent way, each time the services were loaded. That means that once the attacker dropped a malicious DLL, the services would load the malicious code each time it was restarted.
Aug 28th, 2019 - Vulnerability reported to Lenovo PSIRT
Aug 28th, 2019 - Initial automatic response from Lenovo
Aug 28th, 2019 - Lenovo asked for a clarification
Aug 29th, 2019 - We sent a clarification
Aug 30th, 2019 - Status update from Lenovo
Sep 6th, 2019 - Status update from Lenovo
Sep 13th, 2019 - Lenovo confirmed the vulnerability
Sep 25th, 2019 - Lenovo shared a timeline for a fix deployment
Oct 22nd, 2019 - Lenovo issued CVE-2019-6189, and shared a final timeline for a public disclosure (End of November).
Nov 15th, 2019 - Lenovo said that they will disclose the issue on November 19th.
Nov 19th, 2019 - Lenovo published a security advisory[1]
[1] https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/LEN-29198