Slashdot Mirror
Exploiting the DRAM Rowhammer Bug To Gain Kernel Privileges
New submitter netelder sends this excerpt from the Project Zero blog:
'Rowhammer' is a problem with some recent DRAM devices in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause bit flips in adjacent rows. We tested a selection of laptops and found that a subset of them exhibited the problem. We built two working privilege escalation exploits that use this effect. One exploit uses rowhammer-induced bit flips to gain kernel privileges on x86-64 Linux when run as an unprivileged userland process. When run on a machine vulnerable to the rowhammer problem, the process was able to induce bit flips in page table entries (PTEs). It was able to use this to gain write access to its own page table, and hence gain read-write access (PDF) to all of physical memory.
I cannot believe this, an AC on slashdot told me that privilege escalation is impossible in Linux, so this must be wrong
Wherever You Go, There You Are
words do not mean anything today as each cpu has a different number of bytes representing each word.
How much ram is that?
http://saveie6.com/
I'm sure all operating systems (kernels) will be similarly vulnerable to a hardware bug like this, so I think your pious comment is out of place.
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing