CVE-2013-1306: MSIE 9 MSHTML CDisp­Node::Insert­Sibling­Node use-after-free details

Since November I have been releasing details on all vulnerabilities I
found that I have not released before. This is the twenty-eighth entry
in the series. This information is available in more detail on my blog
at http://blog.skylined.nl/20161208001.html. There you can find a repro
that triggered this issue in addition to the information below.

Today's release is again not very interesting, because it also was one
of the first bugs I found and reported back in 2012, before I had
developed the tools and skills to properly analyze MSIE bugs. This
report is therefore very scarce in information. I did get some more
details from EIP about the root cause, which I've included.

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MSIE 9 MSHTML CDispNode::InsertSiblingNode use-after-free
==============================
===========================
(MS13-037, CVE-2013-1306)

Synopsis
--------
A specially crafted web-page can trigger a memory corruption
vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. I did not investigate
this vulnerability thoroughly, so I cannot speculate on the potential
impact or exploitability.

Known affected software and attack vectors
------------------------------------------
* Microsoft Internet Explorer 9
  An attacker would need to get a target user to open a specially
  crafted web-page. JavaScript does not appear to be required for an
  attacker to triggering the vulnerable code path.

Details
-------
This bug was found back when I had very little knowledge and tools to do
analysis on use-after-free bugs, so I have no details to share. The EIP
provided me with some details of their analysis, which I'll paraphrase
here: It is a use-after-free vulnerability where the span object in the
frame.html file is reused after being freed. It appears to be impossible
to reallocate the freed memory before it is reused. Part of the freed
memory is overwritten when it is freed because a WORD `FreeEntryOffset`
value is stored at offset 0. This value is then used as part of a
pointer to a vftable in order to call a method. This pointer now consist
of the upper 16-bits of the old vftable and the lower 16-bits contain
the `FreeEntryOffset` value. Exploitation is near impossible without a
way to have more control over this pointer in the freed memory block.
ZDI also did a more thorough analysis and [provide very similar details
in their advisory at
http://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-13-082/

Time-line
---------
* 27 September 2012: This vulnerability was found through fuzzing.
* 3 October 2012: This vulnerability was submitted to EIP.
* 11 October 2012: This vulnerability was rejected by EIP.
* 2 November 2012: This vulnerability was submitted to ZDI.
* 19 November 2012: This vulnerability was acquired by ZDI.
* 22 January 2013: This vulnerability was disclosed to Microsoft by ZDI.
* 29 May 2013: Microsoft addresses this vulnerability in MS13-037.
* 8 December 2016: Details of this vulnerability are released.

Cheers,

SkyLined