3DS Userland Flaws

This page lists vulnerabilities / exploits for 3DS applications and applets. Exploiting these initially results in ROP, from that ROP one can then for example try exploiting system flaw(s).

Non-system applications

Application name	Summary	Description	Fixed in app/system version	Last app/system version this flaw was checked for	Timeframe info related to this was added to wiki	Timeframe this vuln was discovered	Vuln discovered by
Cubic Ninja	Map-data stack smash	See here regarding Ninjhax.	None	App: Initial version. System: 10.4.0-29.	Ninjhax release	July 2014	smea
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D	UTF-16 name string buffer overflow via unchecked u8 length field	The u8 at offset 0x2C in the savefile is the character-length of the UTF-16 string at offset 0x1C. When copying this string, it's essentially a memory-copy with lenval*2, not a string-copy. This can be used to trigger buffer overflows at various locations depending on the string length. When value is >=0x6E it crashes when saving the saveslot, this causes a stack-smash however it normally crashes before it returns from the function which had the stack-frame overwritten. With value >=0x9A, it crashes via stack-smash in-game once any dialogs are opened(touching buttons on the touch-screen can trigger it too). Length value>=0xCD causes a crash while loading the saveslot, via a heap buffer overflow. This buf-overflow overwrites a heap memchunk following the allocated buffer. When the first 16-bits overwriting that heap memchunk is not the memchunk magic-number(0x7373), the mem-alloc code will just return a NULL ptr which later results in a crash. When the magic-number is valid, the mem-alloc code will continue to attempt to parse the memchunk, which may crash depending on the data which overwrote the memchunk. This heap code is separate from the CTRSDK heap code. Exploiting this doesn't seem to be possible: since the heap code actually verifies that the magic-number for the next/prev memchunk ptrs are correct(unlike CTRSDK), it's not possible to change those ptrs to useful arbitrary addresses outside of savedata(like with triggering a write to a c++ object ptr which later is used with a vtable func-call, this is what one would do with CTRSDK heap here). On March 11, 2015, an exploit using this vuln was released, that one was intended for warez/etc. The following exploit wasn't released before then mainly because doing so would (presumably) result in the vuln being fixed. The following old exploit was released on March 14, 2015: [1].	None	App: Initial version. System: 10.6.0-31.	March 11, 2015	Around October 22, 2012	Yellows8
Super Smash Bros 3DS	Buffer overflow in local-multiplayer beacon handling.	See here.	App: v1.1.3	See here. System: 10.3.0-28.	Time of exploit release.	See here.	Yellows8
Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon	Heap overflow within linear memory via unchecked save file length	Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon uses zlib compression for most of its save files, possibly due to the save files being larger than it's predecessor, Gates to Infinity. When a save file is being prepared to be loaded and read from, only a 0x32000 large buffer is allocated for file reading, and a 0x3e800-large buffer for decompression is also allocated before the file is read. However, the game does not limit the size of the file read to this allocation bound, allowing for the file to overflow into the linear memory heap and into the next allocation. Since Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon stores allocation memchunks directly before the allocation, overwriting the next memchunk with a corrupted one allows for arbitrary writes of linear heap pointers when the next buffer is allocated or arbitrary writes of any pointer within writable memory when the corrupted buffer is freed.	None	10.7.0-32.	Time of exploit release.	April 14, 2016	Shiny Quagsire
VVVVVV	Buffer overflow in XML save file array parsing	VVVVVV utilizes several XML files (renamed with a .vvv extension) to store level save data, stats and settings. Within these XML files are several tags containing an array of data which, when parsed, is not properly checked to be of proper length for the tag being parsed from. This allows for an overflow of 16-bit array values from the location where the array is parsed. With unlock.vvv, XML data is parsed to the stack, and with level saves the heap. This allows for the pointer where the level save worldmap tag array should be parsed into to be overwritten with a stack address, allowing for ROP from within the XML array parsing function on the next level load.	None	10.7.0-32.	Time of exploit release.	April 25, 2016	Shiny Quagsire
Citizens of Earth	Save file read stack smash	Citizens of Earth also uses "XML" files for saves, which are actually entirely binary data (not XML at all) with no checksums. These files are read from the filesystem on to a fixed size stack buffer which leads to an incredibly trivial stack smash. When using the autosave slot for this, the save is parsed when the user selects "continue". When using one of the dedicated save slots (1-3), the save is parsed shortly after the company splash screens fade. Note that the save is read quite high (descending) on the stack - when exploiting this, one would likely need to move SP due to almost instantly overflowing the physical stack.	None	10.7.0-32.	Time of exploit release.	May 5, 2016	Dazzozo
SmileBASIC 3.x	Poor parameter validation on "BGSCREEN" command	The SmileBASIC "BGSCREEN" command's second parameter is not properly validated as being within range. As a result, one can set the screen size to an absurdly large value. This means that the "BGGET" and "BGPUT" commands can then be used on out-of-range values to read and write a significant chunk of the interpreter's address space. With a series of carefully-designed BGPUT commands, one can build a ROP chain and cause it to be executed.	App: 3.3.2.	System: 11.0.0-33.	July 20, 2016	Around June 26, 2016	slackerSnail, 12Me12, incvoid Exploited by MrNbaYoh and plutoo.
The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes	CTRSDK CTPK buffer overflow combined with game's usage of SpotPass	During the very first screen displayed by the game during boot("Loading..."), just seconds after title launch, the game loads CTPK from the stored SpotPass content. Hence, this game could be exploited via the vulnerable CTRSDK CTPK code if one could get custom SpotPass data into extdata somehow(ctr-httpwn >=v1.2 with bosshaxx allows this). The code for this runs from a thread separate from the main-thread, with the stack in linearmem heap. This SpotPass handling triggers before the game ever opens the regular savedata archive. The extdata is opened at some point before this: it opens a file for checking if it exists, then immediately closes it. The two SpotPass URLs for this have always(?) returned HTTP 404 as of November 2016. It appears these were intended for use as textures for additional costumes(and never got used publicly), but this wasn't tested. This is used by ctpkpwn_tfh.	None	App: v2.1.0	November 18, 2016	November 14, 2016	Yellows8
Pixel Paint	Buffer overflow via unchecked extdata file length	Pixel Paint loads pictures saved by the user from extdatas. The file is read to a fixed size buffer but the file length remains unchecked, so with a large enough file, one can overwrite pointers in memory and gain control of the execution flow.	None	App: Initial version. System: 11.2.0-35.	December 27, 2016	November 5, 2016	MrNbaYoh
Steel Diver : Sub Wars	Heap overflow / arbitrary memcpy	Savefile datas are stored as key/value pairs, a large enough string key makes the game overwrite a memcpy source/destination addresses and size arguments. So one can actually memcpy a rop on the stack and gain control of the execution flow.	None	System: 11.2.0-35.	December 27, 2016	Around July 15, 2016	MrNbaYoh, Vegaroxas
1001 Spikes	Buffer overflow via unchecked array-indexes in XML savefile parsing	The savefiles are stored as renamed .xml files, which contain several tags with attributes like 'array-index="array-value"', where both of these are converted from ASCII strings to integers as signed-int32, and the array-value given blindly written to an array inside a structure using the (unchecked) index given. With several of these attributes, one can overwrite the stack starting from the stored lr of the function that does this parsing, and write a ROP chain there. Testing used the "LevelAttempts" tag which is the last such tag parsed in that function.	None	App: v1.2.0 (TMD v2096)	December 27, 2016	Around November 2, 2016	Riley
Pokemon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire	Secret base team name heap overflow	When the player wants to edit the team name, it is copied over the heap, however it's length is not verified. So with a large enough team name one can overwrite some pointers and get two arbitrary jumps and then get control of the execution flow.	None	App: 1.4. System: 11.2.0-35.	December 30, 2016	June, 2016	MrNbaYoh

Useless crashes / applications which were fuzzed

• Pushmo (3DSWare), QR codes: level name is properly limited to 16 characters, game doesn't crash with a longer name. The only possible crashes are triggered by out-of-bounds array index values, these crashes are not exploitable due to the index value being 8bit.

• Pyramids (3DSWare), QR codes: no strings. Only crashes are from out-of-bounds values (like background ID) and are not exploitable.

• Pyramids 2 (3DSWare), QR codes: no strings. Only crashes are from out-of-bounds values (like background ID) and are not exploitable.

• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D

• "The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds" and "The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes": these games don't crash at all when the entire save-file(minus constant header data) is overwritten with /dev/random output / 0xFF-bytes. All of the CRC32s were updated for this of course.

• Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity has the same unchecked file bounds as Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon, however since save compression was introduced in Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon, it only allocates one buffer within the application heap instead of several within the linear heap, resulting in nothing to corrupt or overwrite even if the file's length is extended past it's allocation.

• "Kid Icarus: Uprising": Overwriting the entire savedata results in various crashes, nothing useful.

• Savedata/extdata for "Super Smash Bros 3DS": Overwriting the various files stored under savedata/extdata results in useless crashes.

• "StarFox 64 3D": Doesn't crash at all with the entire savedata overwritten.

• "Frogger 3D": Overwriting a savefile with random-data results in *nothing* crashing.

• "Mutant Mudds": Overwriting the savefile with random data results in a crash

• "Animal Crossing: New Leaf": Creating a QR code from random data results in a valid QR code and a random design. In some very rare cases(which aren't always reproducible?) a crash/etc may occur, but this isn't known to be useful.

Crashes needing investigation

• Disney Infinity crashes when all savedata overwritten with /dev/urandom. No checksums. 0xFF bytes don't cause a crash.

• Football Up Online / Soccer Up Online and Football Up 3D / Soccer Up 3D crash when teamname(UTF-16) length = 0x48 AND 0x20 null bytes are removed after just the name or if teamname length is way longer than 0x48.

System applications

Summary	Description	Fixed in version	Last version this flaw was checked for	Timeframe this was discovered	Discovered by
3DS System Settings DS profile string stack-smash	Too long or corrupted strings (01Ah 2 Nickname length in characters 050h 2 Message length in characters) in the NVRAM DS user settings (System Settings->Other Settings->Profile->Nintendo DS Profile) cause it to crash in 3DS-mode due to a stack-smash. The DSi is not vulnerable to this, DSi launcher(menu) and DSi System Settings will reset the NVRAM user-settings if the length field values are too long(same result as when the CRCs are invalid). TWL_FIRM also resets the NVRAM user-settings when the string-length(s) are too long.	7.0.0-13	7.0.0-13	2012	Ichfly
Nintendo 3DS Sound	"A heap overflow in tag processing leads to code execution when a specially- crafted m4a file is loaded by Nintendo 3DS Sound." (description from soundhax's github readme)	None	11.2.0-35	2016	nedwill

System applets

Summary	Description	Fixed in version	Last version this flaw was checked for	Introduced with version	Timeframe info related to this was added to wiki	Timeframe this was discovered	Discovered by
Webkit/web-browser bugs	spider has had at least three different code-execution exploits. Majority of them are use-after-free issues. See also here.				2013?		A lot of people.
Old3DS/New3DS Browser-version-check bypass	When the browser-version-check code runs where the savedata for it was never initialized(such as when the user used the "Initialize savedata" option), it will use base_timestamp=0 instead of the timestamp loaded from savedata. This is then used with "if(cur_timestamp - base_timestamp >= <24h timestamp>){Run browser-version-check HTTPS request code}". Hence, if the savedata was just initialized, and if the system datetime is set to before January 2, 2000, the browser-version-check will be skipped. This includes January 1, 2000, 00:00, because that's the epoch(timestamp value 0x0) used with this timestamp. See here for bypass usage instructions. This was fixed with 10.7.0-32, see here for details.	10.7.0-32		9.9.0-26	February 25, 2016	November 2, 2015 (Exactly one week after the browser version pages were initially updated server-side)	Yellows8

Home Menu

Summary	Description	Fixed in version	Last version this flaw was checked for	Introduced with version	Timeframe info related to this was added to wiki	Timeframe this was discovered	Discovered by
bossbannerhax	This isn't really useful due to this. After successfully loading extended-banner data(done when selecting an icon), Home Menu attempts to load CBMD data into a 0x100000-byte heap buffer from the stored SpotPass content. When successful and the magic-number is CBMD, Home Menu then decompresses the CGFX sections into another fixed-size heap buffer, without checking the outsize at all. The main CBMD CGFX code with ExeFS checks the size, but this code doesn't.	None	11.2.0-X	1.0.0-0	November 18, 2016	December 23, 2014	Yellows8
sdiconhax	This is basically the same as nandiconhax, the vulnerable SD/NAND functions are identical minus the file-buffer offsets. Exploitation is different due to different heap-buffer location though. Unlike nandiconhax, the icon buffer for SD is located in linearmem(with recent Home Menu versions at least). This is used by menuhax.	11.1.0-X		4.0.0-X	July 27, 2016	October 23, 2015	Yellows8
NAND-savedata Launcher.dat icons (nandiconhax)	The homemenu code processing the titleid list @ launcherdat+8 copies those titleIDs to another buffer, where the offset relative to that buffer is calculated using the corresponding s8/s16 entries. Those two values are not range checked at all. Hence, one can use this to write u64(s) with arbitrary values to before/after this allocated output buffer. See here regarding Launcher.dat structure. This can be exploited(with Launcher.dat loading at startup at least) by using a s16 for the icon entry with value 0xFFEC(-20)(and perhaps more icons with similar s16 values to write multiple u64s). The result is that the u64 value is written to outbuf-0xA0, which overwrites object+0(vtable) and object+4(doesn't matter here) for an object that gets used a bit after the vulnerable function triggers. The low 32bits of the u64 can then be set to the address of controlled memory(either outbuf in regular heap or the entire launcherdat buffer in linearmem), for use as a fake vtable in order to get control of PC. From there one can begin ROP via vtable funcptrs to do a stack-pivot(r4=objectaddr at the time the above object gets used). Originally this vuln could only be triggered via Launcher.dat at Home Menu startup, right after Launcher.dat gets loaded + memory gets allocated, once the file-format version code is finished running. Starting with v9.6 this can be triggered when loading layouts from SD extdata as well. The vuln itself triggers before the layout data is written to Launcher.dat, but it doesn't seem to be possible to overwrite anything which actually gets used before the function which writes Launcher.dat into the layout gets called. Home Menu has some sort of fail-safe system(or at least on v9.7) when Home Menu crashes due to Launcher.dat(this also applies for other things with Home Menu): after crashing once, Home Menu resets Launcher.dat to a state where it no longer crashes anymore. However, note that any exploits using this which hang/etc without crashing will still brick the system. Hence, attempting anything with this on physnand without hw-nand-access isn't really recommended.	11.1.0-X		4.0.0-X		May 14, 2015	Yellows8
Theme-data decompression buffer overflow (themehax)	The only func-call size parameter used by the theme decompression function is one for the compressed size, none for the decompressed size. The decompressed-size value from the LZ header is used by this function to check when to stop decompressing, but this function itself has nothing to verify the decompressed_size with. The code calling this function does not check or even use the decompressed size from the header either. This function is separate from the rest of the Home Menu code: the function used for decompressing themes is *only* used for decompressing themes, nothing else. There's a separate decompression function in Home Menu used for decompressing everything else. That other decompression function in Home Menu handles decompression size properly(decompressed size check for max buffer size is done by code calling the other function, not in the function itself). Unlike the other function, the theme function supports multiple LZ algorithms, but the one which actually gets used in official themes is the same one supported by the other function anyway. See also here. With 10.2.0-X Home Menu, the only code change was that the following was added right after theme-load and before actual decompression: "if(<get_lzheader_decompressed_size>(compressed_buf) > 0x150000)<exit>;". This fixed the vuln.	10.2.0-X	10.2.0-X	<Old3DS/New3DS version which added initial theme support>		December 22, 2014	Yellows8, Myria independently (~spring 2015)
Shuffle body-data buffer overflow (shufflehax)	See here.	10.6.0-X	10.6.0-X	9.3.0-X		January 3, 2015	Yellows8
Extdata file-data loading buffer overflow	The extdata file-reading code allocates a fixed-size heap buffer for the expected filesize, then reads the filedata into this buffer using the actual FS filesize. Before v5.0 the filesize used here wasn't validated, hence if the filesize is larger than alloc_size a buffer overflow would occur. After doing the file-read it does validate that the actual_readsize matches the alloc_size, but at this point the buffer overflow has already occurred. This affected at least the following: SaveData.dat and Cache.dat. This can be triggered with SaveData.dat by installing a <v4.0 Home Menu version, with Home Menu extdata from >=v4.0 still on SD. When this is done with v2.0 Home Menu, a kernelpanic occurs when processing an AM command(it appears a buffer ptr which is then passed to a command was overwritten with 0x0 - of course other SaveData.dat filesizes may result in different behaviour).	5.0.0-X		2.0.0-X	June 9, 2016	June 9, 2016	Yellows8

The icon data arrays used with {sd/nand}iconhax were added to SaveData.dat/Launcher.dat with 4.0.0-X, hence the vulnerable functions were added with that same version.

With <=v4.0 the SaveData.dat buffer is located in the regular heap. It's unknown when exactly it was moved to linearmem, which is where it's located with recent versions. It's located in linearmem for KOR >=v9.6 for example.

The SaveData.dat/Launcher.dat icon vulns were fixed by doing various unsigned >=60/>=360 checks on the loaded values. When these checks fail, it just skips over handling this icon entry. Hence, the original value can't be negative / out-of-bounds any more.

Useless crashes

Old3DS system web-browser:

• 2^32 characters long string(finally fixed with v10.6): this is similar to the vulnerability fixed here, concat-large-strings-crash2.html triggers a crash which is about the same as the one triggered by a 2^32 string. Most of the time this vulnerability will cause a memory page permissions fault, since the WebKit code attempts to copy the string text data to the output buffer located in read-only CRO heap memory. The only difference between a crash triggered by a 2^32 string and the concat-large-strings-crash2.html crash is at the former copies the string data using the original string length(like 1 text character for "x", 4 for "xxxx") while the latter attempts to copy >12MB. In some very rare cases a thread separate from the string data-copy thread will crash, this might be exploitable. However, this is mostly useless since it rarely crashes this way.

• Trying to directly load a page via the browser "URL" option with webkitdebug setup, causes a crash to trigger in oss.cro due to an use-after-free being caught with webkitdebug. This is presumably some sort of realloc() issue in the libcurl version used by the <={v10.2-v10.3} browser. This happens with *every* *single* *page* one tries to load via the "URL" option, but not when loading links on the current page, hence this is probably useless. A different use-after-free with realloc triggers with loading any page at all regardless of method too(libcurl probably).

• This WebKit build has a lot of crash-trigger bugs that only happen with webkitdebug completely setup(addr accesses near 0x0), with just trying to load any page at all.