Kernel-hack-drill and a new approach to exploiting CVE-2024-50264 in the Linux kernel

Some memory corruption bugs are much harder to exploit than others. They can involve race conditions, crash the system, and impose limitations that make a researcher's life difficult. Working with such fragile vulnerabilities demands significant time and effort. CVE-2024-50264 in the Linux kernel is one such hard bug, which received the Pwnie Award 2025 as the Best Privilege Escalation. In this article, I introduce my personal project kernel-hack-drill and show how it helped me to exploit CVE-2024-50264.