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To avoid these situations, it is recommended that memory be allocated and freed at the same level of abstraction, and preferably in the same code module.

Non-compliant Code Example 1

The affects of not following this recommendation are best demonstrated by an actual vulnerability. Freeing memory in different modules resulted in a vulnerability in MIT Kerberos 5 http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/advisories/MITKRB5-SA-2004-002-dblfree.txt. The problem is the MIT Kerberos 5 code contains error-handling logic, which frees memory allocated by the ASN.1 decoders if pointers to the allocated memory are non-null. However, if a detectable error occurs, the ASN.1 decoders themselves free memory which they have allocated. When some library functions receive errors from the ASN.1 decoders, they also attempt to free, causing a double-free vulnerability.

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