Is Fedora, or Linux in general, vulnerable to a "paging exploit" like Vista appears to be?

Douglas Phillipson phillipd at oem.doe.gov
Thu Oct 19 19:33:28 UTC 2006


I just read a new exploit for Vista that in my mind could be plausible 
for Linux also.  It involves forcing unused device drivers in memory to 
be paged to disk by allocating gobs of memory, then a program finds the 
area on the disk where the device driver code is and replaces it with 
exploited code.  When the driver gets paged back into Kernel memory you 
now have full access to the machine.  Could this happen to Linux? Can a 
non-root or even a root owned process access the swap space.  Swap is a 
file on Windows which probably makes it easier than Linux.  Swap on 
Linux typically is a unformatted file system, but can be a file in the 
file system if desired.  As I understand the exploit, Microsoft has 
implemented a policy with Vista that only drivers "Signed" by Microsoft 
can be installed on Vista.  This "Paging" exploit completely bypasses 
this requirement, easily.

Here is the exploit presentation:

http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-06/BH-US-06-Rutkowska.pdf

DSP




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