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⚔ Commemorated today: The Scourge of Stuxnet (2010)Saint SLUBStick, Who Made Lame Bugs Reliable
Patron of Linux kernel allocators, page tables, and exploits that used to work one time in two.
Life
Presented at USENIX Security 2024 by Lukas Maar and colleagues at TU Graz, he was not a bug but a method. Cross-cache attacks, which recycle memory from one kernel cache into another, often failed and crashed the system; SLUBStick used a timing side channel on the SLUB allocator to make them more than 99% reliable, and then went on to manipulate page tables. With nine real CVEs it demonstrated privilege escalation and container escapes.
Prayer
O Saint SLUBStick, who steadies even the shakiest exploits, let our kernels not hand their pages to every passer-by. Amen.
How to celebrate
Celebrated by fixing small heap bugs before someone makes them big, and enabling the kernel defences that keep caches apart.
Give a lame bug a crutch, and it will run too much.