Mitigating Use-After-Free Attack with Application Program Loader

In the area of software security, use-after-free vulnerabilities have been reported since 2006. When the target vulnerable application is run, the attack exploits a dangling pointer after the heap memory is released. Until today, use-after-free attacks have been frequently reported in popular software such as browsers. This is a serious software security problem because a use-after-free attack allows an attacker to execute an arbitrary code to hijack an application control flow or to force a system crash. Some countermeasures have been proposed to thwart such attacks. However, most of these countermeasures have some problems such as the necessity of a source code or the problem of dependency. In this paper, we propose and evaluate the implementation of an application-level program loader to mitigate the use-after-free attack.