> However, because the named pipe only responds to authenticated users, successful exploitation requires valid login credentials for the target machine.
Eh
MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds
21–30 of 68 posts
Re: MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds
#22> So far, for the vulnerabilities I have reported to Google, ASUS, AMD, TP-Link, Netgear, MSI (and more), they have paid out a total of $0 in bug bounties. Why bother reporting to them ? You could just as well sell it to third parties if it doesn't interest them.
You understand the concept of doing something that doesn't bring direct monetary benefit?
He makes a point, though: bug bounties exist to incentivize people to find and report bugs to a company. We talk about white, gray, and black hats, roughly based on their level of ethics. For black hats – and some gray hats – money is one of the big reasons they look for vulnerabilities.
Re: MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds
#23I wish the author went into a bit more detail about how MSI fixed it, as is usual in write ups like this. It left me thinking maybe the patch introduced a different vulnerability that’s still under an embargo :)
Video by GN has a little bit of info (but not a lot). Basically they made it so that the pipes only accept input from MSI signed software + the pipes can only invoke MSI signed executables.
Re: MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds
#24> After this minor hiccup, the experience with MSI was actually quite pleasant. They prepared a patch for the vulnerability within two days of me reporting it and told me which MSI Center release it was to be bundled with, and when they planned to release the new version. Was NOT expecting a happy ending. I don't know if the part of MSI Center with the pipe vulnerability is automatically installed on desktops but thi…
And this is the only way to set the charging limit on your laptop, which is awful practice.
Oh, and of course it's so bad, that if you once uninstalled it, you need a special cleanup software which may or may not work, but most likely you're done and can't install instgain.
All to set the charging level which, say, Framework exposes in BIOS.
I know there are some Linux-based ways that are supposed to safely write the threshold to EC, but none worked in my case (reasonably new model, supported by every piece of Linux-based software I checked), and one of them flipped the VMD Controller support on, which makes my nvmes invisible to the installed OS.
Awful, terrible piece of software.
Re: MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds
#25> So far, for the vulnerabilities I have reported to Google, ASUS, AMD, TP-Link, Netgear, MSI (and more), they have paid out a total of $0 in bug bounties. Why bother reporting to them ? You could just as well sell it to third parties if it doesn't interest them.
You understand the concept of doing something that doesn't bring direct monetary benefit?
you understand the concept of zero days ?
companies should be better and if not, criminally liable for their bad code.
Re: MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds
#26> So far, for the vulnerabilities I have reported to Google, ASUS, AMD, TP-Link, Netgear, MSI (and more), they have paid out a total of $0 in bug bounties. Why bother reporting to them ? You could just as well sell it to third parties if it doesn't interest them.
You understand the concept of doing something that doesn't bring direct monetary benefit?
In other words, bootlicking the corpo-authoritarians?
Re: MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds
#27As you might have guessed, these are incredibly dangerous tools to be exposing to any authorised user
If your only goal is to stop users from doing what they want on the hardware they own, you are everything that is wrong with the "security" industry today.
Re: MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds
#28As you might have guessed, these are incredibly dangerous tools to be exposing to any authorised user If your only goal is to stop users from doing what they want on the hardware they own, you are everything that is wrong with the "security" industry today.
I don't want any random program on my computer to be able to change all of my system settings and terminate security processes.
Re: MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds
#29Is there any valid reason to still be using 3DES in 2026? It was formally deprecated in 2018 and has been surpassed in just about every single way by AES long before that. At this point I feel like it's use is such a huge red flag
It was an architectural problem, not an encryption problem. Even with AES instead of 3DES, the same issue would exist, which is spoofing the commands of any of the legitimate MSI services.
Re: MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds
#30As you might have guessed, these are incredibly dangerous tools to be exposing to any authorised user If your only goal is to stop users from doing what they want on the hardware they own, you are everything that is wrong with the "security" industry today.
You cut the rest of the sentence
> including ones without local admin
I don’t know anything about windows, but it looks like a local privilege escalation.