Exploiting Heap Allocators Technical Paper
An academic paper I authored in October 2019, as part of studying Modern Exploit Development at UNSW. Abstract Heap oriented exploits continue to be an ongoing threat, and have gained popularity post the stack smashing frenzy of the 90’s and early 00’s. Even so called safe languages (e.g. JavaScript, Java) remain vulnerable due to their underlying C/C++ implementations. Heap allocator designs and implementations, of which there are many, struggle to strike the balance between performance and security, performance often winning out to keep programs running as fast as possible. Two ingredients are needed for a successful heap exploit, the first a memory management error in the target program, and second an exploitable heap allocator implementation. Many countermeasures in mainstream allocators seen to date are often the result of knee-jerk reactions to exploits of the past, with patching occurring to existing designs. A large body of research exists around detecting, preventing or mitigating heap attacks. ...