Trying to Dance the Samba: An Exercise in Weaponizing Vulnerabilities

The blog post recounts an attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in the Samba software, specifically targeting Ubuntu 17.10, to assess the feasibility of weaponizing publicly disclosed bugs. Despite the initial goal of leveraging an information leak and a use-after-free flaw for code execution, the effort faced numerous obstacles, ultimately resulting in an unsuccessful exploitation. The analysis highlights the complexities involved in exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities and the challenges presented by Ubuntu's compile-time hardening flags, such as -DFORTIFY_SOURCE=2, -z norelro, and -PIE. The exercise underscores the importance of understanding the intricacies of memory management and the potential difficulties adversaries face when attempting to exploit similar vulnerabilities. Although the expected outcome of a reliable exploit was not achieved, the process provided valuable insights into the exploitation landscape and the resilience of modern software defenses.