Dynamic Detection of Vulnerable DMA Race Conditions
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The drivers of modern operating systems use Direct Memory Access (DMA) to efficiently communicate with peripheral devices. Since the memory accessed by DMA is a shared resource between driver and device, it is a possible source of race conditions. Peripheral devices are also often untrusted, so these race conditions open up a new potential attack vector against a trusted OS kernel. In this paper, we present DMARacer, a dynamic detector called for these DMA-based race conditions in kernel code. DMARacer tracks memory accesses to DMA memory throughout the kernel's lifetime and analyses them for various indicators of race conditions. Additionally, upon detecting a race condition, DMARacer uses taint tracking to trace its impact and identify any potential vulnerabilities it may trigger, such as memory corruption or denial-of-service. We used DMARacer to search the drivers of the Linux kernel for DMA-based errors and find that DMA-based race conditions are a systemic issue in driver code. In total, DMARacer was able to detect 817 problematic memory accesses and 344 vulnerable operations in the scanned Linux kernel drivers.
Institutions: Qualcomm (United States), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Language: English
Subfield: Software
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4416549312