Researchers at the Graz University of Technology in Austria have found a new cross-cache attack (PDF) that can bypass modern kernel defenses and provide arbitrary read and write access. The exploits involved affect Linux kernel versions 5.19 and 6.2.
The team has dubbed the attack technique SLUBStick. This attack vector takes advantage of memory reuse of the kernel allocator in a novel way, making it more reliable than most other cross-cache attacks. Whereas most cross-cache attacks have a success rate of just 40%, the researchers pushed SLUBStick to a 99% success rate for frequently used generic caches.
