Riot and its installer crash if system-wide ASLR in Windows 10 is enabled

[dephekt]

Description

When using native Windows 10 exploit protection features such as mandatory ASLR and bottom-up ASLR, the Riot for Windows installer crashes. If an exception is made for the installer executable, the installation crashes when trying to launch Riot.exe, for similar reasons.

Steps to reproduce

• Enable system-wide mandatory ASLR in Windows security exploit protection settings
• Run the Riot for Windows installer or Riot.exe

Expected behavior: the installer or Riot application launch. Actual behavior:

Log: None available

Version information

• Platform: Desktop
• OS: Windows 10 Pro v1803, build 17134.48
• Version: 0.14.2

Workaround

Mandatory ASLR and bottom-up ASLR features have to be manually overridden on both the installer and Riot.exe to overcome these issues and get Riot installed and running:

Notes

Other Electron-based apps on this system do not require overriding the system-level settings to function properly, for example Signal Desktop installs and runs fine in the presence of system-wide ASLR.

[lampholder]

I wasn't familiar with the ASLR setting - is it particularly common that people will have it enabled? Is it a new setting that we'll see more and more of in the future?

[MTRNord]

I guess that is squirel vs nsis installer which cause Problems here. Signal uses afaik nsis and riot squirel. Maybe squirel is missing some Feature.

[dephekt]

@lampholder I can't say as far as how widespread it is, but as Microsoft iterates on their enterprise security solution and more apps start moving into containers that there might be more using it. It's not enabled by default for all processes, only for system processes.

There's an option to change it and the overrides are pretty simple to set as a workaround for the two apps I have that don't play nice with it (PyCharm and Riot), which makes it less serious, but the lack of a descriptive error probably makes it hard for more casual users to track down the cause if they can't immediately correlate enabling ASLR with the crashing of Riot.

In my case I had just enabled it on a fresh system and was anticipating memory-related issues, but I have practical experience with buffer overflows and ASLR, so I'm not a good gauge. I mostly wanted to bring it to your attention(s) so you could judge how to (or not to) prioritize dealing with it in your SDLC.

[NN---]

@dephekt Cygwin and git also have a problem with ASLR: https://stackoverflow.com/a/48446934/558098

[kittykat]

@dephekt could you test if this still happens with the latest versions please?

[novocaine]

I cannot replicate with all ASLR features enabled, including mandatory and bottom-up, Windows 10 Pro 10.0.19042

How to enable them https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/defender-endpoint/customize-exploit-protection?view=o365-worldwide#configure-system-level-mitigations-with-the-windows-security-app