BUDAlloc: Defeating Use-After-Free Bugs by Decoupling Virtual Address Management from Kernel
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Presented at USENIX Security 2024 by
Use-after-free bugs are an important class of vulnerabilities that often pose serious security threats. To prevent or detect use-after-free bugs, one-time allocators have recently gained attention for their better performance scalability and immediate detection of use-after-free bugs compared to garbage collection approaches. This paper introduces BUDAlloc, a one-time-allocator for detecting and protecting use-after-free bugs in unmodified binaries. The core idea is co-designing a user-level allocator and kernel by separating virtual and physical address management. The user-level allocator manages virtual address layout, eliminating the need for system calls when creating virtual alias, which is essential for reducing internal fragmentation caused by the one-time-allocator. BUDAlloc customizes the kernel page fault handler with eBPF for batching unmap requests when freeing objects. In SPEC CPU 2017, BUDAlloc achieves a 15% performance improvement over DangZero and reduces memory overhead by 61% compared to FFmalloc.