Article

Comprehensively and efficiently protecting the heap

Authors:

Mazen Kharbutli,

Guru Venkataramani,

Milos PrvulovicAuthors Info & Claims

ASPLOS XII: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems

Pages 207 - 218

https://doi.org/10.1145/1168857.1168884

Published: 20 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to propose a scheme that provides comprehensive security protection for the heap. Heap vulnerabilities are increasingly being exploited for attacks on computer programs. In most implementations, the heap management library keeps the heap meta-data (heap structure information) and the application's heap data in an interleaved fashion and does not protect them against each other. Such implementations are inherently unsafe: vulnerabilities in the application can cause the heap library to perform unintended actions to achieve control-flow and non-control attacks.Unfortunately, current heap protection techniques are limited in that they use too many assumptions on how the attacks will be performed, require new hardware support, or require too many changes to the software developers' toolchain. We propose Heap Server, a new solution that does not have such drawbacks. Through existing virtual memory and inter-process protection mechanisms, Heap Server prevents the heap meta-data from being illegally overwritten, and heap data from being meaningfully overwritten. We show that through aggressive optimizations and parallelism, Heap Server protects the heap with nearly-negligible performance overheads even on heap-intensive applications. We also verify the protection against several real-world exploits and attack kernels.

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Cited By

Wang QZheng LAn ZXiong SWang RHuang YYao PLiao XJin HXue J(2024)A Scalable, Efficient, and Robust Dynamic Memory Management Library for HLS-based FPGAs2024 57th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00040(437-450)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00040
Gain GSoldani CHuici FMathy LGavrilovska AAltınbüken DBinnig C(2022)Want more unikernels?Proceedings of the 13th Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3542929.3563473(510-525)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3542929.3563473
Ibn Ziad MArroyo MManzhosov EPiersma RSethumadhavan S(2021)No-FAT: Architectural Support for Low Overhead Memory Safety Checks2021 ACM/IEEE 48th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA)10.1109/ISCA52012.2021.00076(916-929)Online publication date: Jun-2021
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Index Terms

Comprehensively and efficiently protecting the heap
1. Computer systems organization

Recommendations

Comprehensively and efficiently protecting the heap
Proceedings of the 2006 ASPLOS Conference

The goal of this paper is to propose a scheme that provides comprehensive security protection for the heap. Heap vulnerabilities are increasingly being exploited for attacks on computer programs. In most implementations, the heap management library ...
Comprehensively and efficiently protecting the heap
Proceedings of the 2006 ASPLOS Conference

The goal of this paper is to propose a scheme that provides comprehensive security protection for the heap. Heap vulnerabilities are increasingly being exploited for attacks on computer programs. In most implementations, the heap management library ...
Comprehensively and efficiently protecting the heap
Proceedings of the 2006 ASPLOS Conference

The goal of this paper is to propose a scheme that provides comprehensive security protection for the heap. Heap vulnerabilities are increasingly being exploited for attacks on computer programs. In most implementations, the heap management library ...

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Information & Contributors

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ASPLOS XII: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems

October 2006

440 pages

ISBN:1595934510

DOI:10.1145/1168857

General Chair:
John Paul Shen
Intel Corp.
,
Program Chair:
Margaret R. Martonosi
Princeton University

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 41, Issue 11
Proceedings of the 2006 ASPLOS Conference
November 2006
425 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1168918
Issue’s Table of Contents
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 40, Issue 5
Proceedings of the 2006 ASPLOS Conference
December 2006
425 pages
ISSN:0163-5980
DOI:10.1145/1168917
Issue’s Table of Contents
ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Volume 34, Issue 5
Proceedings of the 2006 ASPLOS Conference
December 2006
425 pages
ISSN:0163-5964
DOI:10.1145/1168919
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

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Published: 20 October 2006

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ASPLOS06: Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

October 21 - 25, 2006

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ASPLOS XII Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 158 submissions, 24%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 535 of 2,713 submissions, 20%

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Cited By

Wang QZheng LAn ZXiong SWang RHuang YYao PLiao XJin HXue J(2024)A Scalable, Efficient, and Robust Dynamic Memory Management Library for HLS-based FPGAs2024 57th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00040(437-450)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00040
Gain GSoldani CHuici FMathy LGavrilovska AAltınbüken DBinnig C(2022)Want more unikernels?Proceedings of the 13th Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3542929.3563473(510-525)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3542929.3563473
Ibn Ziad MArroyo MManzhosov EPiersma RSethumadhavan S(2021)No-FAT: Architectural Support for Low Overhead Memory Safety Checks2021 ACM/IEEE 48th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA)10.1109/ISCA52012.2021.00076(916-929)Online publication date: Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISCA52012.2021.00076
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Garg RMohan ASullivan MCooperman G(2018)CRUM: Checkpoint-Restart Support for CUDA's Unified Memory2018 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER)10.1109/CLUSTER.2018.00047(302-313)Online publication date: Sep-2018
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Chekole EChattopadhyay SOchoa MHuaqun G(2018)Enforcing Full-Stack Memory-Safety in Cyber-Physical SystemsEngineering Secure Software and Systems10.1007/978-3-319-94496-8_2(9-26)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2018
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Silvestro SLiu HCrosser CLin ZLiu TThuraisingham BEvans DMalkin TXu D(2017)FreeGuardProceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3133956.3133957(2389-2403)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2017
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Nagarakatte SMartin MZdancewic S(2014)WatchdogLiteProceedings of Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/2581122.2544147(175-184)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2014
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Nagarakatte SMartin MZdancewic S(2014)WatchdogLiteProceedings of Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/2544137.2544147(175-184)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2014
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