Memory Allocation

Objectives

Heap-related vulnerabilities, such as overflow, double-free, and use-after-free (UAF), are widespread and pose significant threats. Yet, many default memory allocators offer limited protection against these vulnerabilities. This project focuses on creating secure memory allocators with straightforward and effective designs, aiming to develop alternatives to the default system allocators that ensure both enhanced security and acceptable performance overheads.

Conference/journal paper publications

  1. SeMalloc: Semantics-Informed Memory Allocator
    Ruizhe Wang, Meng Xu, and N. Asokan
    In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Oct 2024
  2. S2malloc: Statistically Secure Allocator for Use-After-Free Protection And More
    Ruizhe Wang, Meng Xu, and N. Asokan
    In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA), Jul 2024

Source code