Worming through IDEs

Presented at DEF CON 29 (2021), Aug. 6, 2021, 12:30 p.m. (20 minutes)

You might think that as long as you never hit run, opening up that interesting new POC in your IDE and checking out the code is safe. But it isn't. IDEs and developer tools are complex pieces of software that have vulnerabilities, just like everything else. We'll start by discussing what a reasonable threat model is for IDEs. How do companies threat model their IDEs? What do users expect of their IDEs? Is viewing a file equivalent to executing it? Then we'll dive into the reality of it. Nearly every IDE examined was trivially vulnerable. But there were also a variety of subtle bugs lying underneath. We'll look at bugs in both local IDEs (like VSCode and IntelliJ) and cloud-based IDEs (like AWS Cloud9 and Github Codespaces). Finally, we'll show how an attacker could make a worm that would spread through attacking IDEs. View a malicious project? Let's automatically backdoor every project on a computer and keep spreading. REFERENCES: https://github.com/numirias/security/blob/master/doc/2019-06-04_ace-vim-neovim.md https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2012-3479 http://blog.saynotolinux.com/blog/2016/08/15/jetbrains-ide-remote-code-execution-and-local-file-disclosure-vulnerability-analysis/ https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-15146/product_id-49160/year-2019/Jetbrains-Intellij-Idea.html

Presenters:

  • David Dworken - Security Engineer, Google
    David is a bug bounty hunter turned software engineer turned security engineer. He started in security in high school hacking on bug bounties and then spent four years learning how to be an effective software engineer. He's worked on five different product security teams ranging from startups to large corporations. He previously published a research paper on tracking malicious proxies in ACSAC. Currently, he works as a security engineer at Google working on deploying an alphabet soup of security headers across hundreds of services. @ddworken daviddworken.com

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