Nightmare Eclipse - The Comments in the Code

When you're reading through exploit source, most of the comments are technical — edge case notes, TODO markers, disabled debug prints. The Nightmare Eclipse toolset has those too. But scattered through the three releases are a handful of lines that have nothing to do with implementation and everything to do with the person who wrote it.

I've been going through the source in detail for the technical writeups I posted earlier this week. The comments caught my attention.

RedSun opens with this, two lines in:

// It gets funnier as time passes…
        

No context. No explanation. Just an ellipsis and whatever that means to the author. Given the circumstances — a researcher who publicly stated Microsoft had destroyed their career, releasing working zero-days against one of the world's most deployed security products — it reads less like a joke and more like someone watching consequences unfold exactly as expected.

A few hundred lines later, where RedSun registers its fake cloud sync provider, the provider name is "SERIOUSLYMSFT". The comment attached to that line:

// let's see how long you can play this game, I'm willing to go as far as you want.
        

This is a direct reference to the cat-and-mouse dynamic between Nightmare-Eclipse and Microsoft over Cloud Files API abuse. Microsoft has patched CfApi-based exploit vectors multiple times. The researcher has found new ones multiple times. The comment isn't random frustration — it's a specific taunt at a specific engineering team about a specific ongoing contest, and it's sitting in production exploit code.

BlueHammer is more complex code, and the comments are largely functional. But the sync provider name tells you where the author's head was: "IHATEMICROSOFT". Compared to RedSun's pointed "SERIOUSLYMSFT", it's less subtle. BlueHammer was released earlier — after whatever triggered the initial disclosure breakdown.

UnDefend is the most interesting case. It's also the messiest code of the three — the author left in a // TODO on string null termination that was never fixed, and there's a memory size bug that doesn't affect functionality but is obviously wrong. Above the handle tracking function, the comment reads:

// shit code but works i guess
        

That's self-aware in a way the other comments aren't. The author knows it's not clean. They shipped it anyway.

And then at line 209, directed at anyone trying to reverse-engineer the oplock strategy:

// if you are reading this, you are autistic.
        

The choice of target here is specific: not Microsoft, not the industry, not whoever wronged them. It's aimed at analysts. At people like me. The comment exists in code that was publicly released — it was always going to be read. The author wanted whoever eventually dug through UnDefend's locking pattern to find a taunt waiting for them.

I don't think any of this changes the technical analysis. The exploits work independently of the commentary, and the commentary doesn't tell you anything about the mechanics that the code itself doesn't.

What it does tell you is something about the state of a person who spent what was clearly a significant amount of time building three sophisticated tools, and chose to leave these particular markers in them. The opening line of RedSun isn't a joke — it reads like someone who had already decided what they were going to do and was watching the clock run out. The sync provider names are someone picking fights by name. The taunt at analysts is someone who expected to be studied and wanted the last word.

The code is technically serious. The comments are personally revealing. When you read both together, the picture of why this happened is a lot clearer than Microsoft's official statements, or the thread of tweets from the disclosure aftermath, or anything else written about the situation from the outside.

Sometimes the most honest documentation is the stuff that wasn't meant to be documentation at all.