Description

An issue was discovered in DPU in Samsung Mobile Processor Exynos 1280, 2200, 1380, 1480, 2400, 1580, 2500, 1680, and 2600. A double-free vulnerability in the Samsung Exynos DPU driver (due to improper pointer management during DMA buffer reallocation) leads to kernel memory corruption and a potential use-after-free.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "4.2",
  "pubDate": "2026-09-14T02:17:13.537Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-09-14T02:17:13.537Z",
  "executiveSummary": "This vulnerability involves a critical memory management flaw identified within the Display Processing Unit (DPU) driver of various Samsung Exynos mobile processors.\nThe issue is classified as a double-free vulnerability, stemming from improper pointer management during the reallocation of Direct Memory Access (DMA) buffers.\nAffected products include Exynos 1280, 2200, 1380, 1480, 2400, 1580, 2500, 1680, and 2600 chipsets.\nThe corruption of kernel memory presents a significant security risk, as it facilitates a Use-After-Free (UAF) condition.\nSuccessful exploitation of this flaw can lead to kernel-level memory corruption, potentially allowing an attacker to achieve arbitrary code execution, escalate privileges, or cause a denial-of-service by crashing the system kernel.\nGiven that the vulnerability resides within the kernel-space driver, an attacker would typically require access to the device's user-space environment to trigger the malformed DMA operations through specific ioctl calls or driver interfaces.\nThe impact is severe due to the loss of kernel integrity, which is a fundamental component of the mobile device's security architecture.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability originates in the Samsung Exynos DPU driver, specifically during the handling of DMA buffer reallocation operations.\nA double-free error occurs when the driver logic erroneously frees the same memory address multiple times due to inconsistent pointer state tracking during dynamic memory reallocation events.\nIn the context of the DPU driver, this state inconsistency likely manifests when an asynchronous or concurrent reallocation request interrupts the primary buffer management flow, leading to a race condition or a failure to update reference counters appropriately.\nThe attack flow initiates when an attacker triggers the specific driver function responsible for DMA buffer management, likely through a crafted ioctl interface that allows for the manipulation of buffer lifecycle states.\nBy inducing the driver to free a memory object while retaining a dangling pointer in the kernel heap, the attacker triggers a Use-After-Free condition.\nOnce the memory has been freed and potentially reallocated for another kernel process, the dangling pointer allows for read/write access to that newly allocated data.\nThe exploitation process generally involves heap grooming to ensure that a sensitive kernel object is allocated into the vacated memory slot. An attacker can then manipulate this object to achieve control over kernel execution flow, for example, by overwriting function pointers or sensitive kernel data structures.\nBecause the DPU driver operates with kernel privileges, the scope of the impact encompasses the entire mobile operating system, bypassing standard user-space sandbox protections.\nThe vulnerability affects versions across the specified Exynos processor series (1280, 2200, 1380, 1480, 2400, 1580, 2500, 1680, 2600), indicating a recurring pattern in the DPU driver's memory management implementation across different generations of the Exynos architecture.\nThis type of memory corruption is difficult to detect without specialized kernel debugging tools, and once triggered, the resulting instability or silent memory corruption can lead to reliable exploitation paths for advanced threat actors capable of executing local code on the target device."
}