That causality is wrong. The vulnerability doesn't exist because Samsung products are attractive to exploit. It's a brain-damaged driver (exposes physical memory directly, which even /dev/mem doesn't anymore; and it's created with global write priviledges, meaning that literally no one with a clue about security ever looked at it). Samsung screwed up badly here.
A microkernel wouldn't have helped them here -- it looks to me like this driver exists precisely to defeat the existing protections that prevent userspace access to device memory. If that was the requirement, no kernel architecture would have helped this.
Comments
That causality is wrong. The vulnerability doesn't exist because Samsung products are attractive to exploit. It's a brain-damaged driver (exposes physical memory directly, which even /dev/mem doesn't anymore; and it's created with global write priviledges, meaning that literally no one with a clue about security ever looked at it). Samsung screwed up badly here.
A microkernel wouldn't have helped them here -- it looks to me like this driver exists precisely to defeat the existing protections that prevent userspace access to device memory. If that was the requirement, no kernel architecture would have helped this.