Heap Exploitation
The glibc
library provides functions such as free
and malloc
to help developers manage the heap memory according to their use cases. It is the responsibility of the developer to:
free
any memory he/she has obtained usingmalloc
.Do not
free
the same memory more than once.Ensure that memory usage does not go beyond the amount of memory requested, in other terms, prevent heap overflows.
Failing to do makes the software vulnerable to various kinds of attacks. Shellphish, a famous Capture the Flag team from UC Santa Barbara, has done a great job in listing a variety of heap exploitation techniques in how2heap. Attacks described in "The Malloc Maleficarum" by "Phantasmal Phantasmagoria" in an email to the "Bugtraq" mailing list are also described.
A summary of the attacks has been described below:
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