Characterizing, exploiting, and detecting DMA code injection vulnerabilities in the presence of an IOMMU
Alex Markuze, Shay Vargaftik, Gil Kupfer, Boris Pismenny, Nadav Amit, Adam Morrison, Dan Tsafrir · 2021
Direct memory access (DMA) renders a system vulnerable to DMA attacks, in which I/O devices access memory regions not intended for their use. Hardware input-output memory management units (IOMMU) can be used to provide protection. However, an IOMMU cannot prevent all DMA attacks because it only restricts DMA at page-level granularity, leading to sub-page vulnerabilities.