Driving Forward in Android Drivers: Exploring the future of Android kernel hacking

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Presented at Shmoocon 2024 by

Seth Jenkins

Android kernel exploitation has increasingly utilized bugs in hardware-specific drivers to achieve local privilege escalation. GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) drivers represent a substantial portion of this attack surface, however, numerous other Android chipset component drivers are also viable targets for an attacker. These drivers represent a relatively untapped source of kernel privilege escalation bugs. This talk will take a deeper look at how to perform research into these drivers and will discuss two drivers where serious security issues were discovered. This will culminate in a discussion on the development of an exploit for one of these issues. It will also demonstrate this exploit, achieving kernel arbitrary read/write and root access on a stock Android phone.