Practical Guide to Out-of-Tree Mitigations on Linux
Original title: Practical guide on out of tree mitigations on Linux
Step-by-step instructions for deploying hardened allocators such as hardened_malloc, mimalloc secure mode, and scudo to defend against heap overflows and use-after-free bugs on Linux.
The article provides a practical guide to out-of-tree mitigations focused on hardened allocators as a defense against buffer overflows and other heap-based attacks. It assumes systemd-based systems and recommends hardened_malloc as the default choice from GrapheneOS, with alternatives like mimalloc and scudo. Configuration uses LD_PRELOAD for dynamic linking, and examples demonstrate how these allocators cause programs to crash faster on malformed states.
- hardened_malloc is GrapheneOS fork of OpenBSD allocator
- mimalloc secure mode via MI_SECURE=ON
- scudo is LLVM standalone allocator
- LD_PRELOAD replaces default glibc allocator
- Organizations
- GrapheneOS
From the original article
14 min read at clehaxze.tw
My previous blog post was a quick one and a reader from Gemini sent me an email asking what exactly I did for implementing the mitigations. Thanks for asking and sorry for making you ask. This article should explain what is done and how to tweak the recipe.
By clehaxze.tw via morj · clehaxze.tw
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.