POPKORN: Popping Windows Kernel Drivers At Scale
Rajat Gupta, Lukas Dresel, Noah Spahn, Giovanni Vigna, Christopher Kruegel, Taesoo Kim · 2022
External vendors develop a significant percentage of Windows kernel drivers, and Microsoft relies on these vendors to handle all aspects of driver security. Unfortunately, device vendors are not immune to software bugs, which in some cases can be exploited to gain elevated privileges. Testing the security of kernel drivers remains challenging: the lack of source code, the requirement of the presence of a physical device, and the need for a functional kernel execution environment are all factors that can prevent thorough security analysis. As a result, there are no binary analysis tools that can scale and accurately find bugs at the Windows kernel level.