Apples Whitehat Hacker gift for Xmas

Whitehat in action discovers Kiosk Escape & Escalation via Windows PasswordAgent

In the last few days some Whitehat hackers of the Vulnerability Lab have come together for an action at the station wilhelmshöhe in kassel (Germany) to deal with a new security hole of the Deutsche Bahn ticket machines. While the station woke up quietly at 05:00 in the early morning without security personnel, the action took place. In the first step of this article, we want to focus on the vulnerability and then explain our approach as a group.

It is possible for local attackers to break out of the kiosk mode of the Deutsche Bahn vending machine application if the Password Agent (PasswordAgent.exe) of the system receives a timeout or has a runtime error in the program itself in the background. These errors can occur due to aborted sessions, unclean logout or common errors when using the application at system level.