Related papers: FreeGuard: A Faster Secure Heap Allocator

Heap-based exploits that leverage memory management errors continue to pose a significant threat to application security. The root cause of these vulnerabilities are the memory management errors within the applications, however various…

Attacks on heap memory, encompassing memory overflow, double and invalid free, use-after-free (UAF), and various heap spraying techniques are ever-increasing. Existing entropy-based secure memory allocators provide statistical defenses…

Heap memory errors remain a major source of software vulnerabilities. Existing memory safety defenses aim at protecting all objects, resulting in high performance cost and incomplete protection. Instead, we propose an approach that…

Heap security has been a major concern since the past two decades. Recently many methods have been proposed to secure heap i.e. to avoid heap overrun and attacks. The paper describes a method suggested to secure heap at the operating system…

The heap is a critical and widely used component of many applications. Due to its dynamic nature, combined with the complexity of heap management algorithms, it is also a frequent target for security exploits. To enhance the heap's…

Memory safety errors continue to pose a significant threat to current computing systems, and graphics processing units (GPUs) are no exception. A prominent class of memory safety algorithms is allocation-based solutions. The key idea is to…

RISC-V is a promising open-source architecture primarily targeted for embedded systems. Programs compiled using the RISC-V toolchain can run bare-metal on the system, and, as such, can be vulnerable to several memory corruption…

In software development, the prevalence of unsafe languages such as C and C++ introduces potential vulnerabilities, especially within the heap, a pivotal component for dynamic memory allocation. Despite its significance, heap management…

Memory safety is traditionally characterized in terms of bad things that cannot happen. This approach is currently embraced in the literature on formal methods for memory safety. However, a general semantic principle for memory safety, that…

Application compartmentalization and privilege separation are our primary weapons against ever-increasing security threats and privacy concerns on connected devices. Despite significant progress, it is still challenging to privilege…

Vulnerabilities emanating from DRAM errors pose a vexing problem that remains, as of yet, unsolved and elusive but cannot be ignored. Prior defenses focused on specific details of early RowHammer attacks and fail to generalize with the…

The security of a computer system depends on OS kernel protection. It is crucial to reveal and inspect new attacks on kernel data, as these are used by hackers. The purpose of this paper is to continue research into attacks on dynamically…

Use-after-free (UAF) is a critical and prevalent problem in memory unsafe languages. While many solutions have been proposed, balancing security, run-time cost, and memory overhead (an impossible trinity) is hard. In this paper, we show one…

Several open-source memory allocators have been ported to CHERI, a hardware capability platform. In this paper we examine the security and performance of these allocators when run under CheriBSD on Arm's experimental Morello platform. We…

Host-based cryptomining malware, commonly known as cryptojackers, have gained notoriety for their stealth and the significant financial losses they cause in Linux-based cloud environments. Existing solutions often struggle with scalability…

Recent advances in foundation models have transformed LLMs from passive conversational systems into autonomous agents capable of reasoning and tool execution. While these capabilities unlock substantial practical value, they also introduce…

Code-reuse attacks have become a kind of common attack method, in which attackers use the existing code in the program to hijack the control flow. Most existing defenses focus on control flow integrity (CFI), code randomization, and…

Protecting system observability records (logs) from compromised OSs has gained significant traction in recent times, with several note-worthy approaches proposed. Unfortunately, none of the proposed approaches achieve high performance with…

Security of embedded computing systems is becoming of paramount concern as these devices become more ubiquitous, contain personal information and are increasingly used for financial transactions. Security attacks targeting embedded systems…

In this paper we explore several contexts where an adversary has an upper hand over the defender by using special hardware in an attack. These include password processing, hard-drive protection, cryptocurrency mining, resource sharing, code…