3 ms·
Not to be harsh, but this article is messy, and I find myself agreeing with the commencts regarding hyperboles and AI-writing. It's a directionless nothingburge
by xianga 2y ago
Not to be harsh, but this article is messy, and I find myself agreeing with the commencts regarding hyperboles and AI-writing. It's a directionless nothingburger that hasn't really made any efforts to look into recent research on memory allocation and hardening.
Some examples:
In the heap-section, the article only cites ±20 year old papers and mixes user- and kernel-space allocators such as Apple's kernel kalloc_type and one for Chrome. Not to mention that the author talks about implemention heap regions per-object as if that wont introduce significant memory and performance overhead and is completely unrealistic in a comodity OS, let alone in a server setting.
The pointer integrity section ends with the statement "The above protections, in combination, can prevent complete software control by attackers able to corrupt memory." - which is not true (see recent CVE i found after a quick search [1]), even for relativly hardened Apple products that use pointer authentication and a type segregated allocator kalloc_type.
Additionally, literally the next sentence in the subsequent section contradicts the previous statement (!): "...therefore, attackers will still be able to change software behavior by corrupting memory". Really dampens the credibility.
If anyone is interested in some recent contributions in the space, I've been looking into these recently (in no particular order): SeaK [2], ViK[3] and Safeslab [4].
[1] https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2025-24085/ https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2025-24085/
[2] https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/wang-zicheng https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentat...
[3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3503222.3507780 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3503222.3507780
[4] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3658644.3670279 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3658644.3670279