Improving Memory Management Security for C and C++

Memory managers are an important part of any modern language: they are used to dynamically allocate memory for use in the program. Many managers exist and depending on the operating system and language. However, two major types of managers can be identified: manual memory allocators and garbage collectors. In the case of manual memory allocators, the programmer must manually release memory back to the system when it is no longer needed. Problems can occur when a programmer forgets to release it (memory leaks), releases it twice or keeps using freed memory. These problems are solved in garbage collectors. However, both manual memory allocators and garbage collectors store management information for the memory they manage. Often, this management information is stored where a buffer overflow could allow an attacker to overwrite this information, providing a reliable way to achieve code execution when exploiting these vulnerabilities. In this paper we describe several vulnerabilities for C and C++ and how these could be exploited by modifying the management information of a representative manual memory allocator and a garbage collector. Afterwards, we present an approach that, when applied to memory managers, will protect against these attack vectors. We implemented our approach by modifying an existing widely used memory allocator. Benchmarks show that this implementation has a negligible, sometimes even beneficial, impact on performance.