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CW 419
Yves Younan, Wouter Joosen, Frank Piessens and Hans Van Den Eynden
Security of memory allocators for C and C++
Abstract
Most memory allocators ignore security issues. Instead they focus on maximizing performance and limiting fragmentation and waste. While these are very important issues for a memory allocator, in the days of worms that use code injection attacks to cause significant economical damage, security can not be ignored. This paper evaluates a representative set of commonly used memory allocators for C and C++ with respect to their resilience against code injection attacks. We present a significant improvement for memory allocators in order to increase robustness against code injection attacks. We evaluate this new approach in terms of performance and memory usage and show that the associated overhead is negligible.
report.pdf (192K) / mailto: Y. Younan