Hacker Unlocks 'God Mode' and Shares the 'Key'

L33tdawg: Christopher will also be at #HITBGSEC Singapore at the end of August.

When a room filled with hundreds of security professionals erupts into applause, it's notable. When that happens less than five minutes into a presentation, it's remarkable. But that's what transpired when security researcher Christopher Domas last week showed a room at Black Hat USA how to break the so-called ring-privilege model of modern CPU security.

In the hardware, different types of accounts are assigned to different "rings of privilege," with users at ring three and the system administrator at ring 0. Domas in his research hacked the ring with a string consisting of four hexadecimal characters. Such an attack could allow a program from a "regular" user to assume kernel-level control, executing at a higher privilege than most security software - and bypassing the vast majority of techniques used by anti-malware and hardware control systems today.