The 2017 Pwnie Nominee For Most Innovative Research

Drammer

Credit: Victor van der Veen, Yanick Fratantonio, Martina Lindorfer, Daniel Gruss, Clementine Maurice, Giovanni Vigna, Herbert Bos, Kaveh Razavi, Cristiano Giuffrida

Rowhammer was a pretty cool discovery a few years ago but as time goes on, the application of this attack technique continues to improve and impress. Traditional Rowhammer attacks don’t work against mobile platforms. Drammer rectifies this by implementing rowhammer in a completely deterministic way against Android on ARM. In the end, they demonstrate this by getting root on an Android device using no software vulnerabilities and requiring no user permissions. That is like something I think I saw once on CSI: Cyber attack.

Drammer