Leveraging a control flow hijacking primitive (CFHP) to gain root privileges is critical to attackers striving to exploit Linux kernel vulnerabilities. Such attack has become increasingly elusive as security researchers propose capable kernel security mitigations, leading to the development of complex (and, as a trade-off, brittle and unreliable) attack techniques to regain it. In this paper, we obviate the need for complexity by proposing RetSpill, a powerful yet elegant exploitation technique that employs user space data already present on the kernel stack for privilege escalation.

Exploring many execution paths in a binary program is essential to discover new vulnerabilities. Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) is useful to trigger complex input conditions and enables an accurate exploration of a program while providing extensive crash replayability and semantic insights.