Those are the debugging features. Those features (plus the tools you listed) help you during the test phase of your SDLC. In contrast, heap protection / exploi

Those are the debugging features. Those features (plus the tools you listed) help you during the test phase of your SDLC. In contrast, heap protection / exploit mitigation is intended to protect your software in the field from the bugs you did not know about until after the software shipped. Correct software would not need ASLR, stack canaries, NX or heap protection. But these things are widely accepted as required these days. Desirable features are mainly heap overflow protection and double free protection (see [1] for a list of what ptmalloc does). The situation is not entirely simple because the specific protections you want (say in terms of heap metadata protection) depend on the internal design of the allocator and there are a lot of devils in the details. There is some information around on jemalloc exploitation [2] [3], but I do not know if that information is current. I'm not aware of any jemalloc hardening which has happened since then. If you could provide any information in that area I'd be interested to know about it. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Features#Heap_Protector https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Features#Heap_Protector [2] http://phrack.org/issues/68/10.html#article http://phrack.org/issues/68/10.html#article [3] https://github.com/argp/unmask_jemalloc https://github.com/argp/unmask_jemalloc