SlimGuard: A Secure and Memory-Efficient Heap Allocator

SlimGuard is a secure dynamic memory allocator whose design is driven by memory efficiency. We redesign the security features of state-of-the-art allocators with memory efficiency in mind. SlimGuard protects against widespread heap-related attacks such as overflows, over-reads, double/invalid free, and use-after-free. Among other features, SlimGuard uses an efficient fine-grain size classes indexing mechanism and implements a novel dynamic canary scheme optimized for memory overhead reduction.

Build SlimGuard

SlimGuard can be built on most modern Linux distributions and has been tested on Ubuntu 18.04 and Debian 10.

To build SlimGuard, run make in /path/to/libSlimGuard

To use SlimGuard, you can

1. link libSlimGuard to your executable

2. setting LD_PRELOAD as an enviromment variable using

export LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/libSlimGuard.so

3. simply run as

LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/libSlimGuard.so /your/app

Tests

For this use cmake:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
make test