Abstract
Mobile phones are the most intimate computing devices of our time. We use them for private and business purposes. At the same time lax update habits of manufacturers make them accumulate disclosed vulnerabilities. That is why smartphones have become very attractive targets for attackers. Until today Graphics Processing Units (GPU) were not considered an interesting mean of payload delivery in mobile devices. However, in this paper, we present how the Direct Memory Access (DMA) capabilities of a mobile GPU can be abused for a privilege escalation attack. We describe a successful and real-world GPU-based attack, discuss problems that the GPU’s different programming model poses, and techniques that lead to a successful attack. We also show a proof-of-concept exploit against a very popular smartphone line. We conclude that DMA-based malware is a serious threat to mobile devices.
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Notes
- 1.
The visible part of a scene.
- 2.
Varyings carry meta-information from the geometry phase to the fragment phase of the GPP, and are subject to interpolation in the rasterization phase.
- 3.
Texture pixel.
- 4.
The Mali MP 400 GPU has one geometry processor (GP) and up to four pixel presenters (PP). Each of these processing cores has its own MMU.
- 5.
The OEM was informed about our findings and fixed the bug.
- 6.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Luc Verhagen and his team for their work on the open source Mali GPU driver. We would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Christian Ludwig in the discovery of the bug presented in this paper. This research was partially funded by the BMWF grant 01IS12032.
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Danisevskis, J., Piekarska, M., Seifert, JP. (2014). Dark Side of the Shader: Mobile GPU-Aided Malware Delivery. In: Lee, HS., Han, DG. (eds) Information Security and Cryptology -- ICISC 2013. ICISC 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8565. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12160-4_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12160-4_29
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