Research Spotlight: Exploiting Use-After-Free Vulnerabilities
Summary: Cisco Talos researchers Earl Carter and Yves Younan described FreeSentry, a software-based mitigation that tracks memory dynamically and invalidates all pointers to a freed location, so any use-after-free attempt crashes the program and blocks exploitation. Talos reported over 20 use-after-free CVEs identified in 2015 alone, said such flaws are the most exploited vulnerabilities on Windows 7 and higher, and noted the technique found new vulnerabilities in a popular performance benchmark that similar mitigations missed.
What you should know: Use-after-free is the most exploited vulnerability class on Windows 7 and higher, and these flaws can sit thousands of lines from the free that created them, so code review and automated testing routinely miss them.
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