Linux Kernel Hacking

Discipline: CS

Advisor: Derrick Greenspan

This project aims to analyze a critical hardware vulnerability, Rowhammer, and effectively mitigate it. Rowhammer is a security vulnerability within DRAM modules caused by repeatedly accessing the same row in memory. Doing this can cause voltage to leak to physically adjacent rows, causing bit flips. This can be exploited by adversaries in real-world scenarios to achieve arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation from unprivileged applications. Our primary objective is to thoroughly assess and research this attack, as well as research and implement a software-only mitigation strategy against it. Specifically, we aim to research mitigation strategies that can be added to the Linux kernel. We aim to keep mitigations purely in software to act as a stop-gap measure until robust hardware mitigations, implemented in DRAM modules, are made widely available and cannot be trivially bypassed. In addition, a software-only mitigation is an adaptable solution that can be rapidly updated and deployed if a new approach is able to bypass our mitigation. By reducing or potentially eliminating the attack surface of Rowhammer, we aim to enhance the security of millions of devices running Linux. This will help safeguard critical system infrastructure, as well as individual users, against this often-ignored exploit vector.

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