Author Archives: Lucian Constantin

Researchers have devised a new way to compromise Android devices without exploiting any software vulnerabilities and instead of taking advantage of a physical design weakness in RAM chips. The attack technique could also affect other ARM and x86-based devices and computers.

The attack stems from the push over the past decade to pack more DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) capacity onto increasingly smaller chips, which can lead to memory cells on adjacent rows leaking electric charges to one another under certain conditions.

For example, repeated and rapid accessing of physical memory locations — an action now dubbed “hammering” — can cause the bit values from adjacent locations to flip from 0 to 1 or the other way around.

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A feature in Intel’s Haswell CPUs can be abused to reliably defeat an anti-exploitation technology that exists in all major operating systems, researchers have found.

The technique, developed by three researchers from State University of New York at Binghamton and the University of California in Riverside, can be used to bypass address space layout randomization (ASLR) and was presented this week at the 49th annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture in Taipei.

ASLR is a security mechanism used by operating systems to randomize the memory addresses used by key areas of processes, so that attackers don’t know where to inject their exploit shellcode.

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A feature in Intel’s Haswell CPUs can be abused to reliably defeat an anti-exploitation technology that exists in all major operating systems, researchers have found.

The technique, developed by three researchers from State University of New York at Binghamton and the University of California in Riverside, can be used to bypass address space layout randomization (ASLR) and was presented this week at the 49th annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture in Taipei.

ASLR is a security mechanism used by operating systems to randomize the memory addresses used by key areas of processes, so that attackers don’t know where to inject their exploit shellcode.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here