Possible ways for hackers to alter kernel behaviour without root

Question

I'm wondering is it possible to harm kernel (by injecting shared library, loadable module or something like that) without root. If yes, how hackers can achieve it?

Unless there is a bug you can't do. But [bugs happen](http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2017/q1/471). — Steffen Ullrich, Feb 23 '17 at 19:03
Look up cpu rings. There are some hardware protections that limit the behavior of certain types of software. — Alex, Feb 23 '17 at 19:35

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 23 '17 at 20:15

There's not supposed to be any way for unprivileged users to modify the running kernel. The two ways that such an attack could happen are either to first exploit a bug in a privileged service or setuid binary to give them root (such as CVE-2010-1646, the secure path vulnerability in sudo), or to exploit a bug in the kernel itself (such as CVE-2017-6074, the DCCP double-free vulnerability).

Possible ways for hackers to alter kernel behaviour without root

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