Preface

This short book is written for people who want to understand the internals of 'heap memory', particularly the implementation of glibc's 'malloc' and 'free' procedures, and also for security researchers who want to get started in the field of heap exploitation.

The first section of the book covers an in-depth, yet concise, description about heap internals. The second section covers some of the most famous attacks. It is assumed that the reader is unfamiliar with this topic. For experienced readers, this text might be good for a quick revision.

• This is not the final version and will keep on updating. For contributing see this.

• The source code for the book can be found on GitHub.

• The canonical URL for the book is https://heap-exploitation.dhavalkapil.com.

• You can subscribe for updates on the book website.

Read for free online (recommended) or download the PDF or ePUB or Mobi/Kindle editions.

Citing heap-exploitation

If you use this book in your research, please use the following BibTex entry:

@software{dhaval_kapil_2022_6450612,
  author       = {Dhaval Kapil},
  title        = {DhavalKapil/heap-exploitation},
  month        = apr,
  year         = 2022,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {v1.0.0},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.6450612},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6450612}
}

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