Authors: Ruizhe Wang, Meng Xu, N. Asokan

Published on: February 02, 2024

Impact Score: 8.12

Arxiv code: Arxiv:2402.01894

Summary

• What is new: S2malloc introduces three new constructs for detecting Use-After-Free (UAF) exploits: free block canaries (FBC), random in-block offset (RIO), and random bag layout (RBL).
• Why this is important: Existing secure memory allocators do not effectively detect UAF attempts due to reliance on entropy, allowing attackers to succeed by repeatedly launching attacks.
• What the research proposes: S2malloc enhances UAF attempt detection without increasing performance overhead significantly, using FBC, RIO, and RBL to obstruct successful attacks.
• Results: S2malloc offers a 69% protection rate against UAF attempts (96% if the attacker does not reuse pointers) for 64 byte objects, with minimal performance overhead.

Technical Details

Technological frameworks used: nan

Models used: nan

Data used: PARSEC and SPEC benchmarks for measuring performance overhead.

Potential Impact

Cybersecurity industries and companies, cloud service providers, and enterprises with significant online operations could benefit from adopting S2malloc for enhanced memory attack protection.

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