Two vulnerabilities in Android OS kernel

Android Honeycomb operating system is widely used for tablet devices, such as Samsung Galaxy Tab. The Android system programs are usually efficient and secure in memory management. However, there has been a few security issues reported that show Android's insufficient protection to the kernel. In this work, we reveal a new security pitfall in memory management that can cause severe errors and even system failures. Existing security software for android do not detect this pitfall, due to the private implementation of Android kernel. We then discuss two vulnerabilities introduced by this pitfall: 1) malicious programs can escalate the root-level privilege of a process, through which it can disable the security software, implant malicious codes and install rootkits in the kernel; 2) deny of service attacks can be launched. Experiments have been conducted to verify these two vulnerabilities on Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 with Tegra 2 CPU. To protect systems from these vulnerabilities, we proposed a patching solution, which has been adopted by Google.