Local privilege escalation via speculative page-fault races
Published Feb 28, 2023 · Updated Mar 21, 2025
Use-after-free flaws in Android GKI kernel memory management allow local users to escalate privileges through speculative page faults. The speculative page-fault path accesses page tables and VMAs without sufficient locking; races with page-table deletion or munmap leave freed pointers available for reads or writes. Low-privileged code can trigger the races without user interaction and corrupt kernel memory, enabling privilege escalation within the device.
Summary
What happened
Use-after-free flaws in Android GKI kernel memory management allow local users to escalate privileges through speculative page faults. The speculative page-fault path accesses page tables and VMAs without sufficient locking; races with page-table deletion or munmap leave freed pointers available for reads or writes. Low-privileged code can trigger the races without user interaction and corrupt kernel memory, enabling privilege escalation within the device.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2023-20937
- Published
- Feb 28, 2023
- Updated
- Mar 21, 2025
- Vendor
- Google Cloud
- Product
- Android
- Classifications
- CWE-416, T1068
- Attack vector
- local
- Privileges
- authenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Feb 28, 2023CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Mar 21, 2025Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
Present is not the same as exploitable
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Is a vulnerable build present?
Compare these published version ranges with your installed build and any vendor patches.
- Affected versionversion=Android kernel
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
Attacks
What attackers are doing with it
Daily unique IPs observed by Shadowserver honeypots for known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs). Missing observations do not establish an absence of attacks.
Public exploit references
- Android GKI kernels contain broken non-upstream Speculative Page Faults MM codeproof of concept · demonstrated
Labels summarize the accepted research assessment. They do not indicate a test against your environment.
Technologies
Your stack
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Your stack
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