The following vulnerability report was submitted to the Razer bug reporting system (Inspectiv). It was closed as invalid because I reportedly did not explain the impact or provide a video PoC of the full attack from start to finish.

Triage-level analysts at Inspectiv failed to understand what the below attempts to convey. I've sent similar reports via HackerOne and Bugcrowd, with similar unsuccessful results. Can you do better than the triage at these organizations?

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Description

The Razer Synapse Windows installer’s “Chroma Connect” (and I believe other) sub-components is vulnerable to privilege escalation. Depending on the environment variables of the user to runs the installer, this can result in the ability for a non-admin user to achieve arbitrary code execution with SYSTEM privileges. At the least-severe, the vulnerability may simply allow for a UAC bypass to allow an un-elevated process the ability to run code with SYSTEM privileges.

The main problem is that ths Synapse installer (when run with the optional sub-components installed) will take the current user’s PATH environment variable and once done modifying it, it will promote it to be the system-wide PATH environment variable. Any user with the ability to place a file in a system-wide PATH directory will have the ability to plant a DLL to achieve code execution with SYSTEM privileges.

The problem with the Razer Synapse installer is that the security of the system is depedent on whether or not the user account who runs the installer has any user-writable directories in their PATH.

Aside from promoting a user-level PATH to a system-wide path, the installer also has two other issues that should perhaps be looked at:

1. environment variables are escaped. e.g. a PATH entry of %SystemRoot%\system32 would be replaced with C:\WINDOWS\system32 after the Razer Synapse installer is complete.
2. The Razer ChromaBroadcast\bin directories are added before the Windows system32 directory.

While neither of these two issues might lead to direct security issues, they are both considered poor practices and should probably be resolved.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create the directory C:\bin
2. Add this directory to the user-level PATH environment variable who will be installing Razer Synapse.
3. Install Razer Synapse RazerSynapseInstaller_V1.12.0.385.exe with at least the “CHROMA CONNECT” sub-option installed.
4. Reboot with a Process Monitor boot log enabled.
5. Filter boot log with path contains c:\bin
6. Note that several DLLs are attempted to be loaded from c:\bin with SYSTEM-priviliged processes.

Note that this was discovered with the Crassus tool: https://github.com/vullabs/Crassus

Screenshots are attached that show the Crassus output, a Procmon log of after wptsextensions.dll is planted in the user-writable directory, resulting in calc.exe executing with SYSTEM privileges, as well as how the system-wide path is modified using both the system-wide PATH before, being merged with the admin-user PATH.

Remediation

The affected installer components should not use user-level paths as input when constructing the system-wide PATH environment variable.

Additionally, the installer should:

• Not automatically expand environment variables when modifying the path.
• Place its own paths at the end of any existing PATH entries.

Attachments

razr_crassus.png

adminpath_before.png

systempath_before.png

razr_systempath_after.png

razr_planted.png