A Curious Tale of Remote Code Execution, The TP-Link Story – CVE-2017-13772
https://www.fidusinfosec.com/tp-link-remote-code-execution-cve-2017-13772/ [www.fidusinfosec.com]
2017-10-21 14:44
This post will outline the steps taken to identify vulnerable code paths, and how we can exploit those paths to gain remote code execution. I will start by describing how I found the first vulnerability, the methods taken to develop a full working exploit and then follow this by showing that this vulnerability presents a “pattern” that potentially exposes this device to hundreds of exploits.
Plus some nice notes about exploiting MIPS.
To develop this exploit, there are a few things to note about the Mips architecture. The first is cache in-coherency. This has been covered extensively in other blogs (I suggest http://www.devttys0.com/2012/10/exploiting-a-mips-stack-overflow/). Put simply, if we try to execute shellcode on the stack, the CPU will check if it has data from that virtual address in its cache already, if it does it will execute that, which means whatever was on the stack before we triggered our exploit will most likely get executed. Moreover, if our shellcode has self-modifying properties (IE we use an encoder), the encoded instructions will end up being executed instead of the decoded.
source: L