TL;DR
FreeGuard is a secure heap allocator that offers strong protection against heap-related attacks with minimal performance overhead, matching the speed of default Linux allocators.
Contribution
It introduces a new secure heap allocator that balances security and performance, addressing scalability issues of previous secure allocators.
Findings
Less than 2% performance overhead on average
Effective in defending against various heap-related attacks
Addresses scalability issues of existing secure allocators
Abstract
In spite of years of improvements to software security, heap-related attacks still remain a severe threat. One reason is that many existing memory allocators fall short in a variety of aspects. For instance, performance-oriented allocators are designed with very limited countermeasures against attacks, but secure allocators generally suffer from significant performance overhead, e.g., running up to 10x slower. This paper, therefore, introduces FreeGuard, a secure memory allocator that prevents or reduces a wide range of heap-related attacks, such as heap overflows, heap over-reads, use-after-frees, as well as double and invalid frees. FreeGuard has similar performance to the default Linux allocator, with less than 2% overhead on average, but provides significant improvement to security guarantees. FreeGuard also addresses multiple implementation issues of existing secure allocators,…
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