All android phones are exposed to rampage vulnerability

It appears that newer Android devices could be exposed to a newly discovered vulnerability called RAMpage. The vulnerability is a variation of the Rowhammer attack that affects Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM).

RAMpage would act similarly to the Rowhammer vulnerability

The Android vulnerability was made public through a research article published by a team made up of members from universities and private companies. RAMpage is a set of DMA-based Rowhammer attacks against the latest Android operating system, consisting of (1) a root exploit, and (2) a series of app-to-app exploit scenarios that prevent all defenses."

The team has not only shown the world that RAMpage exists, but it also has a problem with GuardION. GuardION serves as a "light defense that prevents attacks based on DMA, the primary attack vector of mobile devices, isolating DMA buffers with ranks of guards." Unfortunately, GuardION is not a complete solution and cannot do anything against RAMPage, as the team details that it "only reinforces the fact that DMA-based Rowhammer attacks can no longer flip bits into another process or kernel memory", meaning that other Rowhammer techniques are still possible to breach the security of Android based mobile phones.

The team is in the process of sharing its findings with Google in hopes that better software defenses can be implemented in future versions of the Android operating system.

This makes us realize how vulnerable are mobile phones connected to the Internet. Worst of all, at this very moment, any phone could be affected by security issues that are not even known or have not been discovered yet.

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