Attackers have learned that vulnerabilities can hide in the gaps: gaps between components of a system or gaps in a process or procedure. A researcher last week at DEF CON in Las Vegas showed that device drivers — the small utility applications that allow particular pieces of hardware to work with an operating system — can bridge critical gaps for legitimate hardware and malicious hackers alike.
Jesse Michael and Mickey Shkatov, both of Eclypsium, based their research on the fact that while drivers allow communication between software and hardware, they also facilitate communication between the so-called user mode and the OS kernel. And since they operate at the permission level of the kernel, they indeed can be very powerful tools.
