SlimGuard: Design and Implementation of a Memory Efficient and Secure Heap Allocator

Attacks on the heap are an increasingly severe threat. State-of-the-art secure dynamic memory allocators can offer protection, however their memory consumption is high, making them suboptimal in many situations. We introduce sys, a secure allocator whose design is driven by memory efficiency. Among other features, sys uses an efficient fine-grain size classes indexing mechanism and implements a novel dynamic canary scheme. It offers a low memory overhead due its size classes optimized for canary usage, its on-demand metadata allocation, and the combination of randomized allocations and over-provisioning into a single memory efficient security feature. sys protects against widespread heap-related attacks such as overflows, over-reads, double/invalid free, and use-after-free. Evaluation over a wide range of applications shows that it offers a significant reduction in memory consumption compared to the state-of-the-art secure allocator (up to 2x in macro-benchmarks), while offering similar or better security guarantees and good performance.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Liu, Beichen

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Ravindran, Binoy

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Patterson, Cameron D.
• Olivier, Pierre

• Dynamic Memory Allocation
• Memory Safety

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:23215

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/96291