Aladdin: payload generation technique

by do son · Published May 23, 2023 · Updated August 11, 2024

Aladdin

Aladdin is a payload generation technique based on the work of James Forshaw (@tiraniddo) that allows the deseriallization of a .NET payload and execution in memory. The original vector was documented on https://www.tiraniddo.dev/2017/07/dg-on-windows-10-s-executing-arbitrary.html.

By spawning the process AddInProcess.exe with arguments /guid:32a91b0f-30cd-4c75-be79-ccbd6345de99 and /pid:, the process will start a named pipe under \\.\pipe\32a91b0f-30cd-4c75-be79-ccbd6345de99 and will wait for a .NET Remoting object. If we generate a payload that has the appropriate packet bytes required to communicate with a .NET remoting listener we will be able to trigger the ActivitySurrogateSelector class from System.Workflow.ComponentModel. and gain code execution.

Originally, James Forshaw released a POC here. However, this POC will fail on recent versions of Windows since Microsoft went ahead and patched the vulnerable System.Workflow.ComponentModel.

Nick Landers (@monoxgas) however, identified a way to disable the check that Microsoft introduced and wrote a detailed article. The bypass is documented at pwntester/ysoserial.net#41.

Aladdin is a payload generation tool, which uses the specific bypass as well as the necessary header bytes of the .NET remoting protocol is able to generate initial access payloads that abuse the AddInProcess as originally documented.

The provided templates are:

Notes

In order for the attack to be successful the .NET assembly must contain a single public class with an empty constructor to act as the entry point during deserialization. An example assembly has been included in the project.

public class EntryPoint {

    public EntryPoint() {

        MessageBox.Show("Hello");

    }

}

OpSec

The user-supplied .NET binary will be executed under the AddInProcess.exe that gets spawned from the HTA / JS payload. The spawning of the processes currently happens using the 9BA05972-F6A8-11CF-A442-00A0C90A8F39 COM object (https://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/papers/general/abusing-objects.pdf) which will launch the process as a child of Explorer.exe process.
The GUID supplied in the process parameters of AddInProcess.exe can be user controlled. At the moment the guid is hardcoded in the template and the code.
CHM executes the JScript through XSLT transformation