hardened_malloc

Some days ago I decided to look at Zig a bit more in detail. So I skipped the usual marketing and I checked why it could be an alternative to C or Rust. Could it be? It seems that (debug) allocators are a nice idea, however, it seems that they exist "somehow" already for C, so I wonder: why would you pick this language for your next low level program? They provide runtime checks, so you need thorough testing before you can spot use-after-free or so. It's very similar to the existing situation with c/c++ and the sanitizers, although they work a bit differently. So the question I have for hardcore low level programmers: why don't they invest more on the memory allocators like hardened_malloc[0] instead of starting a new programming language? It would probably be less expensive in terms of time and would help fix existing software. [0]: http

GrapheneOS releases patches very quickly, often even faster than OEMs do. But patches are only useful for fixing individual known vulnerabilities. GrapheneOS additionally focuses on defending against whole classes of vulnerabilities. [1] For example, in addition to fixing memory corruption bugs in individual system components, GrapheneOS has deployed memory protections for the entire OS in the form of hardened_malloc [2] and by enabling the ARM memory tagging extension for the kernel, most system processes (with very few exceptions) and all user-installed apps. The honeypot theories don't make sense, since GrapheneOS is fully open source, and very transparent about developers, funding, infrastructure, and other internal stuff. [1] https://grapheneos.org/features#exploit-protection [2] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/hardened_malloc

The number of combinations is irrelevant if you're not relying on randomness. Graphene sets the tag to a static value on deallocation[0] to prevent use-after-free, you don't even need to guess! The same is true for a lot of buffer overflows, as their allocator ensures two adjacent allocations have different tags, so unless the vuln allows you to skip ahead you'll always trigger a fault. [0] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/hardened_malloc/blob/7481c8857...