Fat Pointers for Temporal Memory Safety of C

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient and comprehensive method for ensuring temporal memory safety in C by extending Checked C with fat pointers and dynamic checks, effectively preventing use-after-free and double free bugs.

Contribution

It presents a novel extension of Checked C with fat pointers and dynamic key-lock checks, achieving better performance and compatibility than existing solutions.

Findings

Significant reduction in performance overhead compared to disjoint-metadata approaches.

Practical implementation demonstrated through real-world application porting.

Enhanced backward compatibility with existing C code.

Abstract

Temporal memory safety bugs, especially use-after-free and double free bugs, pose a major security threat to C programs. Real-world exploits utilizing these bugs enable attackers to read and write arbitrary memory locations, causing disastrous violations of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Many previous solutions retrofit temporal memory safety to C, but they all either incur high performance overhead and/or miss detecting certain types of temporal memory safety bugs. In this paper, we propose a temporal memory safety solution that is both efficient and comprehensive. Specifically, we extend Checked C, a spatially-safe extension to C, with temporally-safe pointers. These are implemented by combining two techniques: fat pointers and dynamic key-lock checks. We show that the fat-pointer solution significantly improves running time and memory overhead compared to the disjoint-metadata approach that provides the same level of protection. With empirical program data and hands-on experience porting real-world applications, we also show that our solution is practical in terms of backward compatibility -- one of the major complaints about fat pointers.