House of Orange

The original House of Orange technique used a heap overflow vulnerability to target the top chunk in its first stage of exploitation. Due to this fact, we can determine that the House of Orange fits within this section of heap exploitation.

The technique

The House of Orange is an interesting, but somewhat convoluted, technique to gain arbitrary code execution of a vulnerable process. The House of Orange is executed in three stages:

• Leverage a heap overflow vulnerability to overwrite the size field of the top chunk.

  • Overwrite the top chunk with a small size, fooling malloc() in future requests to believe that the top chunk is smaller than it actually is.
  • The new top chunk size must be page-aligned and the prev_inuse bit must be set in order to pass malloc() checks.
  • The attacker forces the program to make another malloc() call with a size larger than what is currently written to the top chunk size field.
  • This malloc() call will cause malloc() to mmap() a new segment of heap memory. malloc() will also determine that the new segment of heap memory and the top chunk are not contiguous, causing malloc() to free() the remaining space of the top chunk.
  • This newly free chunk will be too large for the fastbin, it will be linked into the unsortedbin.

• Use the same heap overflow vulnerability and chunk to overwrite the newly freed top chunk that resides in the unsortedbin.

  • The attacker forges the metadata for a fake chunk, setting the chunk size to 0x61, and setting the bk pointer to a chunk that overlaps _IO_list_all in glibc .
  • The attacker will use this to conduct an Unsortedbin Attack, writing the memory address of the unsortedbin head in the main arena to _IO_list_all.
  • The attacker uses the heap overflow to write a fake _IO_FILE struct into the heap, forging a vtable_ptr that points back into attacker controlled memory with the intent of overwriting the overflow method of the struct to system().

• The attacker requests a chunk smaller than the forged chunk that was just created, causing malloc() to sort the free chunk into the smallbin, triggering an Unsortedbin Attack.

  • malloc() attempts to follow our forged bk, however, chunk metadata checks will cause malloc() to call __malloc_printerr(), leading to a SIGABRT.
  • When the program begins its exit procedures, it attempts to clear the buffers of all open file streams, including our forged one.
  • glibc follows _IO_list_all which now points to the main_arena. The main_arena fails _IO_FILE struct checks, and glibc moves on to the next _IO_FILE struct pointed to by the main_arena’s fake chain member - our smallbin.
  • glibc inspects the forged _IO_FILE struct the attacker created in the heap using a heap overflow and executes the overflow method listed in the vtable of the forged _IO_FILE struct. The attacker has overwritten the overflow method listed in the vtable to point to system().
  • The address of the _IO_FILE is passed to this call to system() - the attacker ensures that the string /bin/sh\0 resides at this location, the very first word of bytes in the forged _IO_FILE struct.

Some notes

Like I said, this technique is convoluted. The attacker needs to have the following in order to exploit this vulnerability:

• Ability to edit chunk data
• Ability to control malloc() allocation size
• Heap and glibc address leak if ASLR is enabled
• Heap overflow

Patch

There doesn’t seem to be any specific patch that attempts to mitigate exploitation using the House of Orange. Because there are so many conditions necessary to effectively exploit this technique, the summation of the mitigations applied to glibc over the years have made this technique obsolete.

For instance, the patch applied to actually check the validity of the bk pointer in the unsortedbin causes the Unsortedbin Attack used to execute this technique to fail. In addition, glibc after version 2.28 no longer traverses through all open file streams at program exit to call the overflow method of the stream. This mitigation thwarts this techniques use of File Stream Oriented Programming to gain code execution.

Related pages

• Heap buffer overflow

References

1. https://4ngelboy.blogspot.com/2016/10/hitcon-ctf-qual-2016-house-of-orange.html
2. https://ctf-wiki.github.io/ctf-wiki/pwn/linux/io_file/fsop/