Characterizing, Exploiting, and Detecting DMA Code Injection Vulnerabilities in the Presence of an IOMMU

Direct Memory Access (DMA) makes the system vulnerable to DMA attacks, in which I/O devices access memory regions not intended for their use. Hardware IOMMU protection cannot prevent all DMA attacks because it restricts DMA at page-level granularity leading to sub-page vulnerabilities. Conventional wisdom is that sub-page vulnerabilities that lead to viable DMA attacks are made possible by buggy device drivers or poor (but isolated) driver design choices.

This paper disproves the above belief, showing that it is often the kernel design that enables a DMA attack. To this end, we first categorize sub-page vulnerabilities into four categories, providing insight into the structure of DMA vulnerabilities. Then, to exploit these vulnerabilities, we identify a set of three vulnerability attributes which are sufficient to execute code injection attacks.

We then build analysis tools that detect sub-page vulnerabilities and analyze the Linux kernel. We find that 72% of the device drivers expose sensitive callback pointers, which may be overwritten by a device to hijack kernel control flow.

Aided by the tools’ output, we demonstrate novel code injection attacks on the Linux kernel we term compound attacks. Specifically, while all previously reported attacks are single-step, i.e., with the vulnerability attributes present in a single page, in compound attacks, the vulnerability attributes are initially incomplete. However, they can be attained by carefully exploiting standard OS behavior.