Escaping from Microsoft’s Protected Mode Internet Explorer

Evaluating a potential security boundary

Abstract
The level of protection offered by Protected Mode Internet Explorer® is not well understood and there are common misconceptions about its status as a security feature.This research set out to discover the full extent of how Protected Mode can protect users from zero-day memory corruption vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and third-party extensions.As a result of this research,a bypass of the feature was discovered along with a number of generic attack patterns which must be protected against to prevent future circumvention of the feature.

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