Sockets, Shellcode, Porting, and Coding: Reverse Engineering Exploits and Tool Coding for Security Professionals

Heap Corruption Exploits

 The heap is an area of memory utilized by an application and allocated

dynamically at runtime. It is common for buffer overflows to occur in the heap

memory space and exploitation of these bugs is different than that of stack-

based buffer overflows.

 Unlike stack overflows, heap overflows can be very inconsistent and have

varying exploitation techniques. In this section, we will explore how heap

overflows are introduced in applications, how they can be exploited, and what

can be done to protect against them.

 An application dynamically allocates heap memory as needed.This allocation

occurs through the function call malloc().