This site is the archived OWASP Foundation Wiki and is no longer accepting Account Requests.
To view the new OWASP Foundation website, please visit https://owasp.org

Difference between revisions of "Doubly freeing memory"

From OWASP
Jump to: navigation, search
m
m
Line 130: Line 130:
 
[[Category:OWASP_CLASP_Project]]
 
[[Category:OWASP_CLASP_Project]]
 
[[Category:Code Snippet]]
 
[[Category:Code Snippet]]
[[Category:OWASP C/C++ Project]]
+
[[Category:C/C++]]
 
[[Category:Implementation]]
 
[[Category:Implementation]]

Revision as of 12:36, 22 January 2016

This is a Vulnerability. To view all vulnerabilities, please see the Vulnerability Category page.


Last revision (mm/dd/yy): 01/22/2016

Vulnerabilities Table of Contents

Description

Freeing or deleting the same memory chunk twice may - when combined with other flaws - result in a write-what-where condition.

Consequences

  • Access control: Doubly freeing memory may result in a write-what-where condition, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code.

Exposure period

  • Requirements specification: A language which handles memory allocation and garbage collection automatically might be chosen.
  • Implementation: Double frees are caused most often by lower-level logical errors.

Platform

  • Language: C, C++, Assembly
  • Operating system: All

Required resources

Any

Severity

High

Likelihood of exploit

Low to Medium

Doubly freeing memory can result in roughly the same write-what-where condition that the use of previously freed memory will.


Risk Factors

TBD

Examples

While contrived, this code should be exploitable on Linux distributions which do not ship with heap-chunk check summing turned on.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#define BUFSIZE1    512
#define BUFSIZE2    ((BUFSIZE1/2) - 8)

int main(int argc, char **argv) { 
  char *buf1R1;    
  char *buf2R1;    
  char *buf1R2;    

  buf1R1 = (char *) malloc(BUFSIZE2);    
  buf2R1 = (char *) malloc(BUFSIZE2);    
  
  free(buf1R1);    
  free(buf2R1);    

  buf1R2 = (char *) malloc(BUFSIZE1);    
  strncpy(buf1R2, argv[1], BUFSIZE1-1);    
  
  free(buf2R1);    
  free(buf1R2);
}


Related Attacks


Related Vulnerabilities


Related Controls

  • Implementation: Ensure that each allocation is freed only once. After freeing a chunk, set the pointer to NULL to ensure the pointer cannot be freed again. In complicated error conditions, be sure that clean-up routines respect the state of allocation properly. If the language is object oriented, ensure that object destructors delete each chunk of memory only once.


Related Technical Impacts


References

TBD