Muse pdfdetach POC

Okay, this is a demo of the PDF detach exploit chain. So the way this works, let's uh this is a very uh fresh Muse installation. We just I just reset the VM. So let's give it a name Muse. And what we're going to do is we're going to have Muse analyze this PDF document. And what this exploit actually depends on is there's a tool that I noticed a lot of coding agents or personal assistants use. It's called PDF detach. So when they analyze a PDF document, they uh run that tool to extract the attachments that are in a PDF document. So you can have m multiple documents inside the PDF document. And turns out this that this PDF detach that Muse is going to run here actually when it extracts the files has a path to Rosal vulnerability and that allows you to override arbitrary files on the machine. So what we're going to do is we going to override we're going to write a malicious shared library. we drop that and then we're going to write a LD uh preload file to make sure that we load that malicious file every single time the operating system uh loads uh a C program. So this runs for a while and the final result if it all works we would see a file that is being dropped. So it's an arbitrary code execution we get here basically coming remotely from a file. Um, and if it works, we have a file named oops that should be in the user's home folder. Let's see if we if we drop the file. So, if the if everything worked. So, Muse did detect the malicious library it looks like in this case and the preload drop. But let's see if it actually got exploited. And here we go. So you can see here we have oops.mmd which is the file that the code actually ran. So if we can cut that it should say you are almost here perfect. So this means we achieved uh arbitrary code execution. Imagine like this comes by such an attachment comes with an email or on a website and so on right it's it's technically remote code execution. And uh let's look in details. It look the memory. It does a lot of things here. But somewhere here we should actually see the so it tries to read with Python interestingly. So it runs it runs save first and for some reason save doesn't actually work in this case because there are too many I think and then it will eventually call save all. Yeah I think this thing here. Oh here we go. So save all. So this is uh the vulnerability that this uh library has with the path traversal. The mitigation to the fix is actually pretty simple. It's uh upgrading to the next version. Make sure that the patch is applied for this PDF detach vulnerability. The path traversal problem and um I ask even after that there's still some flaws potentially but this exact exploit so easily would not be possible anymore. But an adversary can still drop binaries but only underneath the current folder or sibling folders I believe. Okay, thank you. [snorts]