Android linux kernel privilege escalation vulnerability and exploit (CVE-2014-4322)

In this blog post we'll go over a Linux kernel privilege escalation vulnerability I discovered which enables arbitrary code execution within the kernel.

The vulnerability affected all devices based on Qualcomm chipsets (that is, based on the "msm" kernel) since February 2012.
 
I'd like to point out that I've responsibly disclosed this issue to Qualcomm, and they've been great as usual, and fixed the issue pretty quickly (see "Timeline" below). Those of you who are interested in the fix, should definitely check out the link above.