Every Android device is susceptible to a hardware vulnerability called RAMpage
Saturday, June 30, 2018 IST
We have consistently seen various vectors of attack rear their head when it comes to Android smartphones. We’ve seen Shattered Trust, Cloak and Dagger, and Rowhammer, just to name a few. RAMpage is the latest one on the block, and while it is a hardware vulnerability, it doesn’t necessarily need physical access to your device to exploit. How it works is relatively simple.
When a CPU reads or writes a row of bits in the RAM module present on the device, the neighboring rows are slightly affected due to a tiny electric discharge. This isn’t usually a problem as we know RAM does this and that’s why it’s periodically refreshed to make sure nothing goes wrong. But what if we start “hammering” the same “row”? What if we continuously read or write to the same row in order to disrupt neighboring rows? This can cause a bit-flip in a memory row that we shouldn’t own or have access to at all. That’s what Rowhammer is, and it’s being used as part of a larger vulnerability called RAMpage. The CVE is CVE-2018-9442 and it affects devices shipped with LPDDR2, LPDDR3, or LPDDR4 RAM. We’ve already covered Rowhammer in greater depth
here.
The Team Behind RAMpage
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
TU Wien
EURECOM
*Harikrishnan Padmanabha Pillai, MSc.
IBM
UC Santa Barbara
UC Santa Barbara
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
What is RAMpage?
RAMpage isn’t exactly new, so to say. RAMpage is a hardware vulnerability which implements Rowhammer and other, smaller exploits. RAMpage can be used to gain root access on a device, but the researchers managed to get it to do a whole lot more as well. It could be used to bypass JavaScript sandboxes and even perform an attack running on another virtual machine on the same computer on x86 devices. ARM-based devices are also vulnerable, and that’s where our Android phones come in. DRAMMER stands for “Deterministic Rowhammer Attacks on Mobile Devices,” and it was able to be used against a number of Android phones in the past to gain root access.
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