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Dynamic memory management is a common source of programming flaws that can lead to security vulnerabilities. Decisions regarding how dynamic memory is allocated, used, and deallocated are the burden of the programmer. Poor memory management can lead to security issues, such as heap-buffer overflows, dangling pointers, and double-free issues [Seacord 2013]. From the programmer's perspective, memory management involves allocating memory, reading and writing to memory, and deallocating memory.

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To avoid these situations, memory should be allocated and freed at the same level of abstraction and, ideally, in the same code module. This includes the use of the following memory allocation and deallocation functions described in Section subclause 7.23.3 of the C Standard [ISO/IEC 9899:2011]:

void *malloc(size_t size);

void *calloc(size_t nmemb, size_t size);

void *realloc(void *ptr, size_t size);

void *aligned_alloc(size_t alignment, size_t size);
 
void free(void *ptr);

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The mismanagement of memory can lead to freeing memory multiple times or writing to already freed memory. Both of these coding errors can result in an attacker executing arbitrary code with the permissions of the vulnerable process. Memory management errors can also lead to resource depletion and denial-of-service attacks.

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Search for vulnerabilities resulting from the violation of this rule on the CERT website.

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Bibliography

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