Mark Seaborn
More info
- Known for
- First practical Rowhammer exploit (2015)
- Affiliation
Google engineer who in 2015 turned Rowhammer from an academic reliability problem into a way of getting root.
Seaborn worked on the sandbox in Native Client, Chrome's system for running native code safely inside the browser. When Yoongu Kim's 2014 paper on DRAM bit flips appeared, he saw what it meant for a sandbox that trusts memory to hold what it was given.
In March 2015 he and Thomas Dullien published two exploits on the Project Zero blog. One escaped Native Client by flipping bits in instructions that had already passed validation. The other sprayed memory with page tables until a flipped bit gave an ordinary process write access to one of them, and with it all of physical memory. Memory vendors had previously called these errors rare; after this they were called vulnerabilities.