Ha2Lloc: Hardware-Assisted Secure Allocator

With ever-increasing complexity of software systems, the number of reported security issues increases as well. Among them, memory corruption attacks are a prevalent vector used against today\u27s software stacks. These attacks are repeatedly leveraged to compromise common application software, such as web browsers or document viewers. However, previous work to mitigate memory corruption attacks either suffer from high overhead or can be bypassed by a knowledgeable attacker. In this work, we introduce HA2lloc, a hardware-Assisted allocator that is capable of leveraging an extended memory management unit to detect memory errors in the heap. We also perform some preliminary testing using HA2lloc in a simulation environment and find that the approach is capable of detecting and preventing common memory vulnerabilities