Alex, Markuze and Vargaftik, Shay and Kupfer, Gil and Pismeny, Boris and Amit, Nadav and Morrison, Adam and Tsafrir, Dan

European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 2021

Direct memory access (DMA) renders a system vulnerable to DMA attacks, in which I/O devices access memory regions not intended for their use. Hardware input–output memory management units (IOMMU) can be used to provide protection. However, an IOMMU cannot prevent all DMA attacks because it only restricts DMA at page-level granularity, leading to sub-page vulnerabilities. Current DMA attacks rely on simple situations in which write access to a kernel pointer is obtained due to sub-page vulnerabilities and all other attack ingredients are available and reside on the same page. We show that DMA vulnerabilities are a deep-rooted issue and it is often the kernel design that enables complex and multistage DMA attacks. This work presents a structured top-down approach to characterize, exploit, and detect them. To this end, we first categorize sub-page vulnerabilities into four types, providing insight into the structure of DMA vulnerabilities. We then identify a set of three vulnerability attributes that are sufficient to execute code injection attacks. We built analysis tools that detect these sub-page vulnerabilities and analyze the Linux kernel. We found that 72% of the device drivers expose callback pointers, which may be overwritten by a device to hijack the kernel control flow. Aided by our tools’ output, we demonstrate novel code injection attacks on the Linux kernel; we refer to these as compound attacks. All previously reported attacks are single-step, with the vulnerability attributes present in a single page. In compound attacks, the vulnerability attributes are initially incomplete. However, we demonstrate that they can be obtained by carefully exploiting standard OS behavior.

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