Undangle: early detection of dangling pointers in use-after-free and double-free vulnerabilities

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Abstract

Use-after-free vulnerabilities are rapidly growing in popularity, especially for exploiting web browsers. Use-after-free (and double-free) vulnerabilities are caused by a program operating on a dangling pointer. In this work we propose early detection, a novel runtime approach for finding and diagnosing use-after-free and double-free vulnerabilities. While previous work focuses on the creation of the vulnerability (i.e., the use of a dangling pointer), early detection shifts the focus to the creation of the dangling pointer(s) at the root of the vulnerability. Early detection increases the effectiveness of testing by identifying unsafe dangling pointers in executions where they are created but not used. It also accelerates vulnerability analysis and minimizes the risk of incomplete fixes, by automatically collecting information about all dangling pointers involved in the vulnerability. We implement our early detection technique in a tool called Undangle. We evaluate Undangle for vulnerability analysis on 8 real-world vulnerabilities. The analysis uncovers that two separate vulnerabilities in Firefox had a common root cause and that their patches did not completely fix the underlying bug. We also evaluate Undangle for testing on the Firefox web browser identifying a potential vulnerability.