Windows Exploitation Techniques: Dangling COM Object Registrations

Publisher excerpt From Google Project Zero

This short blog post is about abusing a privilege escalation bug that Microsoft recently fixed in Windows, CVE-2026-66804, that I and 14 others reported. This issue is an incomplete fix for CVE-2026-50343, a bug dubbed “Dark Elevator” by Calif. The root cause of the bug was a dangling COM object registration for the CrossDevice COM object with the CLSID {E9F83CF2-E0C0-4CA7-AF01-E90C70BEF496}. A COM registration typically needs two parts: a server executable, which for in-process components is a DLL and a CLSID entry under the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT registry key which points to that DLL.

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