The researchers identified four distinct bugs in TTD’s instruction emulation and functioning, including emulation issues with pop r16, push segment, and lodsb/lodsw instructions, as well as an output capture truncation problem in the WinDbg TTDAnalyze debugging extension. The researchers acknowledged Microsoft’s Time Travel Debugging team for their readiness and support in addressing the reported issues, highlighting their prompt communication and commitment to maintaining TTD as a robust and reliable security tool for Windows security research. Mandiant researchers, part of Google’s cybersecurity division, have uncovered several critical security bugs in Microsoft’s Time Travel Debugging (TTD) framework. The findings reveal significant instruction emulation inaccuracies that could potentially compromise security analyses and incident response investigations, leading analysts to overlook threats or draw incorrect conclusions during malware analysis. Time Travel Debugging is a powerful usermode record-and-replay framework developed by Microsoft that allows security researchers and developers to capture a comprehensive recording of a process execution. While the researchers at Google’s Mandiant detected that the discovered bugs could cause significant security and reliability issues. After discovering this initial bug, Mandiant researchers created a fuzzing harness to execute random sequences of instructions and compare the results between real CPU execution and TTD instrumentation. This led to the discovery of additional instruction emulation problems, including issues with push segment instructions that revealed differences between Intel and AMD CPU implementations. Cyber Security News is a Dedicated News Platform For Cyber News, Cyber Attack News, Hacking News & Vulnerability Analysis. While on a real CPU the instruction preserves the upper 16 bits of the register, TTD incorrectly cleared these bits, causing critical discrepancies between native execution and TTD instrumentation.
This Cyber News was published on cybersecuritynews.com. Publication date: Tue, 11 Mar 2025 14:55:06 +0000