Research Spotlight: Free Sentry Mitigating use-after-free Vulnerabilities
Summary: Cisco Talos released FreeSentry, an alpha-stage LLVM plugin and runtime library that mitigates use-after-free vulnerabilities by tracking pointers when they are assigned to objects and invalidating them when the associated memory is freed. The approach was first published at the 2015 NDSS Symposium in February, and an enhanced version ported from CIL to LLVM was presented by Yves Younan at CanSecWest 2015, with a geometric mean overhead of 53% across benchmarked programs.
Bottom line: Use-after-free has become a favored class of bug precisely because mitigations have closed off easier avenues like buffer overflows, and FreeSentry's 53% geometric mean overhead shows the cost of catching it at runtime - a tradeoff each team has to weigh against the attacker who controls a freed object's contents and redirects a function pointer.
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