Abstract
Attacks targeting computer systems become more and more complex and various. Some of them, so-called I/O attacks, areperformed by malicious peripherals that make read or write accesses toDRAM memory or to memory embedded in other peripherals, through DMA (Direct MemoryAccess) requests. Some protection mechanisms to face these attacks exist and have beenimplemented for several years now in modern architectures. A typical exampleis the IOMMU proposed by Intel. However, such mechanisms are not necessarilyproperly configured and used by the firmware and the operating system. Thisexperimental paper describes a design weakness that we discovered in the configuration of an IOMMU by the Intel IOMMU Linux driver and a possibleexploitation scenario that would allow a malicious peripheral to bypass the underlying protection mechanism. The exploitation scenario is implemented with a PCI Express peripheral FPGA, basedon Intel specifications and Linux source code analysis.
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