About one year ago, Chris Paget published a pair of papers that described fundamental flaws in the way the Microsoft Corp. Windows event model is designed. Paget showed how these flaws led to a class of attacks he dubbed "Shatter attacks," and claimed that they were both widespread and unfixable. The boldness of these claims led to a rash of media coverage of this exploit, and a sizeable debate within the security community about the accuracy and importance of his claims.
In response to the pressure exerted by this attention, Microsoft published security bulletin MS02-071 and an associated patch, which has led many to believe that Shatter attacks are no longer possible. iDEFENSE has published a paper written by Oliver Lavery that clarifies what the flaws in the Windows event model are, describes a related vulnerability that continues to exist in many popular software products and suggests ways in which these "unfixable" flaws might be addressed. Titled "Win32 Message Vulnerabilities Redux," the paper is available at http://www.idefense.com/idpapers/Shatter_Redux.pdf.
The appropriate vendors mentioned within received an advance copy of this paper.
