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 using malloc.

  • 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:

Attack

Target

Technique

First Fit

This is not an attack, it just demonstrates the nature of glibc's allocator

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Double Free

Making malloc return an already allocated fastchunk

Disrupt the fastbin by freeing a chunk twice

Forging chunks

Making malloc return a nearly arbitrary pointer

Disrupting fastbin link structure

Unlink Exploit

Getting (nearly)arbitrary write access

Freeing a corrupted chunk and exploiting unlink

Shrinking Free Chunks

Making malloc return a chunk overlapping with an already allocated chunk

Corrupting a free chunk by decreasing its size

House of Spirit

Making malloc return a nearly arbitrary pointer

Forcing freeing of a crafted fake chunk

House of Lore

Making malloc return a nearly arbitrary pointer

Disrupting smallbin link structure

House of Force

Making malloc return a nearly arbitrary pointer

Overflowing into top chunk's header

House of Einherjar

Making malloc return a nearly arbitrary pointer

Overflowing a single byte into the next chunk

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