Heap Taichi: exploiting memory allocation granularity in heap-spraying attacks

Heap spraying is an attack technique commonly used in hijacking browsers to download and execute malicious code. In this attack, attackers first fill a large portion of the victim process's heap with malicious code. Then they exploit a vulnerability to redirect the victim process's control to attackers' code on the heap. Because the location of the injected code is not exactly predictable, traditional heap-spraying attacks need to inject a huge amount of executable code to increase the chance of success. Injected executable code usually includes lots of NOP-like instructions leading to attackers' shellcode. Targeting this attack characteristic, previous solutions detect heap-spraying attacks by searching for the existence of such large amount of NOP sled and other shellcode. In this paper, we analyze the implication of modern operating systems' memory allocation granularity and present Heap Taichi, a new heap spraying technique exploiting the weakness in memor...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ACSAC
• Authors: Yu Ding, Tao Wei, Tielei Wang, Zhenkai Liang, Wei Zou
• Keywords: ACSAC 2010, Code, Heap-spraying Attacks, Memory Allocation Granularity, Security Privacy