Microsoft Security Response Center

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack complexity is high (AC:H). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to carefully time their actions to exploit the timing differences in the execution of specific operations. They must accurately measure these timing variations to infer sensitive information or gain unauthorized access. This often involves sophisticated techniques to manipulate and observe the timing behavior of the target system.

**What privileges would an attacker gain by successfully exploiting this vulnerability?** An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could potentially leak data from the target enclave or execute code within the context of the target enclave.

**How could an attacker exploit this vulnerability?** The attacker would be able to bypass the protection in Outlook that prevents a potentially dangerous file extension from being attached enabling a remote code execution.

**What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability?** An attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability could elevate their privileges to perform commands as Root in the target environment.

**What type of information could be disclosed by this vulnerability?** Exploiting this vulnerability could allow the disclosure of certain memory address within kernel space. Knowing the exact location of kernel memory could be potentially leveraged by an attacker for other malicious activities.

**According to the CVSS metrics, successful exploitation of this vulnerability could lead to some loss of confidentiality (C:L) but have no effect on integrity (I:N) or on availability (A:N). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could view some sensitive information (Confidentiality) but not all resources within the impacted component may be divulged to the attacker. The attacker cannot make changes to disclosed information (Integrity) or limit access to the resource (Availability).

**Are there any additional steps that I need to follow to be protected from this vulnerability?** The changes to address this vulnerability updated Virtual Secure Mode components. The policy described in Guidance for blocking rollback of Virtualization-based Security (VBS) related security updates has been updated to account for the latest changes. If you deployed this policy, then you'll need to redeploy using the updated policy.

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack vector is network (AV:N) and the user interaction is required (UI:R). What is the target context of the remote code execution?** This attack requires a client to connect to a malicious server, and that could allow the attacker to gain code execution on the client.

**According to the CVSS metric, user interaction is required (UI:R). What interaction would the user have to do?** Exploitation of this vulnerability requires that an attacker convinces a user to open a maliciously crafted package file in Visual Studio.

**What type of information could be disclosed by this vulnerability?** Exploiting this vulnerability could allow the disclosure of certain memory address within kernel space. Knowing the exact location of kernel memory could be potentially leveraged by an attacker for other malicious activities.