Applying machinemodel-aided countermeasure design to improve memory allocator security

This paper is a companion paper for the talk that will be presented at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress. We will describe the background on how the results that we detail in the talk were achieved but will not substantially overlap with the talk. We will focus on a more structured approach to build countermeasures using a model of the execution environment. This machinemodel allows reasoning about countermeasures at a higher level and allows for a more effective design where possible shortcomings can be spotted more easily. The paper then describes how we applied this technique to design a countermeasure to protect memory allocators from heap-based attacks.