SeMalloc: Semantics-Informed Memory Allocator

Use-after-free (UAF) is a critical and prevalent problem in memory unsafe languages. While many solutions have been proposed, they seem to balance security, run-time cost, and memory overhead (an impossible trinity) in awkward ways. In this paper, we show that a balance can be achieved by passing more semantics about the heap object to the allocator for it to make informed allocation decisions. More specifically, we propose a new notion of thread-, context-, and flow-sensitive "type", SemaType, to capture the …

balance can cost critical cs.cr free languages memory object prevalent problem run security solutions uaf use-after-free