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Security-related innovation in Unix
Jason Miller, 2005-09-28

Recently, a good friend of mine forwarded me an article from kerneltrap.org, which talked about a new heap implementation that's being introduced into an upcoming release of the OpenBSD operating system. This article was of specific interest to me, as I have been experimenting with the creation of a more secure heap implementation myself.

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Security in Unix 2005-09-29
Alexey Vesnin
Security-related innovation in Unix 2005-10-03
David Emery (1 replies)
Security-related innovation in Unix 2005-10-03
Todd Knarr (1 replies)
I have to wonder here. The "guard pages" sound a lot like the dead pages Electric Fence and NJAMD insert around each allocation to catch over/under-runs. The guard pages introduce a high overhead in terms of memory use (to the point that some programs simply can't run, there isn't enough address space for their allocations) and a noticeable overhead in performance because of the added work in deallocating blocks and merging free blocks.

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/359/32482#32482
It is a contraction! 2005-10-05
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