Sudos and Sudon’ts: Peering Inside Sudo for Windows
Architecture, security boundaries, and vulnerability analysis of Microsoft's Sudo for Windows implementation in Windows 11.
Summary
Sudo for Windows Overview
In February 2024, Microsoft announced the release of Sudo for Windows for Windows 11 Insider Preview[1]. Like the Unix sudo utility, it provides a method for users to run commands with elevated permissions. This talk will share the results of an analysis of Sudo for Windows, starting with a summary of the information provided by Microsoft. From there, we will explore the architecture used to coordinate the elevation of the specified process, the ALPC service used to communicate between elevated and non-elevated processes, how Rust interoperates with Windows APIs, and the path resolution process for files and relative paths. As part of that journey, we will discuss a few discovered security issues.
Security Boundaries and Permissions Model
This presentation will be valuable to anyone with an interest in Windows reverse engineering or Rust memory safety. A conceptual understanding of Windows Inter-Process Communication (IPC) and heap allocation may make parts of the talk more approachable, but the main ideas will be accessible to anyone with a high-level understanding of process memory layout (stack vs heap).
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