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c++cgccmemory-leaks

What is "one-stop memory corruption"?


I'm recently read a paper called Exploiting the Hard-Working DWARF on Hackito Ergo Sum 2011. It contains the phrase "not a one-stop memory corruption". What is that?


Solution

  • It's not an exact term, but basically means something like directly overwriting a bookkeeping datastructure, such as the internal bookkeeping of malloc. "Not a one-stop memory corruption" would be an indirect corruption. This corruption will then cause a later innocent operation to corrupt memory.

    In this particular case, the indirect corruption causes the DWARF exception handling code to corrupt memory.