I’ve written about Shell Extension without ASLR support before.

Not only do they open up explorer.exe to ROP attacks, but other applications too, like Adobe Reader and Microsoft Office.

You could use EMET to force ASLR on these DLLs, assuming you know which applications load shell extensions. Because shell extensions are not only loaded into explorer.exe, but other programs too, I wrote a tool to force Shell Extension DLLs to load at another address than their base address, effectively simulating ASLR.

When my tool, SE_ASLR.dll, is loaded into a process, it will check for the presence of comdlg32.dll inside the list of loaded modules. When comdlg32.dll is used by an application, the likelihood of shell extensions being loaded into the process by user interaction with the file dialogs is significant.

Hence SE_ASLR will patch the IAT to intercept calls to LdrLoadDll. Each time the application loads a DLL (all DLLs, not only shell extension), SE_ASLR will check if the DLL supports ASLR. If it doesn’t, SE_ASLR will pre-allocate a memory page at the base address of the DLL, thereby forcing the loader to load the DLL at another address.

Although SE_ASLR’s primary goal is to relocate shell extensions, it will effectively relocate all DLLs without ASLR support once SE_ASLR is loaded into the process.

You need to load my tool into all applications that could use shell extension, for example via the AppInit_DLLs registry key. But before you do, be sure to test this out on a test machine. Not all shell extensions support relocation.

SE_ASLR_V0_0_0_1.zip (https)

MD5: 9D6AE1A96D554AEE527EB802FE59FB20

SHA256: 8A6C1406A757CD9788A2630D76A497E2C058333EE4D44CA0B85B2A05A39F257E