Attacking the Qualcomm Adreno GPU
Summary: Google Project Zero's Ben Hawkes found that Qualcomm's patch for CVE-2019-10567 was incomplete, and worked with Qualcomm to fix the root cause as CVE-2020-11179, which Qualcomm made available to OEMs in August 2020 and planned to list in its November 2020 bulletin. The research targets the Adreno GPU's /dev/kgsl-3d0 driver, which the Android sandbox exposes to untrusted apps with global read/write permissions and an SELinux allow rule, and describes how a GPU bug could yield kernel code execution from within the application sandbox.
Why it matters: Only two GPU implementations, ARM Mali and Qualcomm Adreno, cover most of the Android ecosystem, so a single exploitable GPU bug can serve as a sandbox escape against a large share of devices - and this one existed because the original CVE-2019-10567 fix did not close the hole.
Read the original at Google Project Zero ↗
- Topics
- Vulnerabilities & Patching
- Mentions
- CVE-2019-10567CVE-2020-11179
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