A Bug Hunter's Diary

Chapter 6. One Kernel to Rule Them All

Note

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Dear Diary,

After spending time auditing open source kernels and finding some interesting bugs, I wondered whether I could find a bug in a Microsoft Windows driver. There are lots of third-party drivers available for Windows, so choosing just a few to explore wasn’t easy. I finally chose some antivirus products, since they’re usually promising targets for bug hunting.^[57] I visited VirusTotal^[58] and chose the first antivirus product that I recognized on its list: avast! from ALWIL Software.^[59] That turned out to be a serendipitous decision.

Note

On June 1, 2010, ALWIL Software was renamed AVAST Software.

6.1 Vulnerability Discovery

I used the following steps to find the vulnerability: ...