Computer security has been described as a game of one-upmanship, an ongoing escalation of techniques as both sides attempt to find new ways to assault and protect system vulnerabilities. The most prevalent forms of incursion over the last decade have been aimed at computer memory -- and of these, the newest, most popular weapon of choice for attackers is a technique known as "heap spraying."

Heap spraying works by allocating multiple objects containing the attacker's exploit code in the program's heap, the area of memory used for dynamic memory allocation. Many recent high-profile attacks, such as an Internet Explorer exploit in December 2008 and one of Adobe Reader in February 2009, were examples of heap spraying.

Heap-spray attacks are difficult to detect reliably, but Ben Livshits and Ben Zorn, researcher and principal researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, respectively, have been studying this problem. They are confident that, in Nozzle, they have a tool for identifying heap-spray attacks that is reliable, general, and practical. During the 18th Usenix Security Symposium, not only did they present their paper, Nozzle: A Defense Against Heap-spraying Code Injection Attacks, co-authored with Paruj Ratanaworabhan of Cornell University, but they also showed a live demo of their solution.

A Brief History of Memory Exploits

The goal of any attack is to get the targeted computer to run exploit code supplied by the attacker. To achieve this, two things must happen: The code must end up on the computer, and the computer must run that code.

The earliest type of memory exploit took advantage of buffer-stack overflows. Attackers found ways to overwrite a buffer on the stack and used that vulnerability to change or insert program code to make the program jump to instructions provided by the attacker. Stack-overflow attacks diminished in effectiveness as programming languages evolved to prevent buffer overflows.

Memory exploits then focused on heap-based overflows, in which, instead of placing instructions on the stack, attackers found ways to insert them into the program's heap. Nowadays, heap-based exploits are more difficult to achieve. Operating systems such as Windows Vista use a technique called "address-based layout randomization," in which the base address of the code, the heap, and the stack change each time the program runs. This prevents attackers from reliably predicting target addresses for code locations, and if there is one copy of the exploit code in a large heap, it's akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Heap spraying circumvents this challenge by allocating, or "spraying," multiple copies of exploit code to increase the odds of finding a copy in the heap. The attacker can allocate hundreds of thousands of copies of exploit code into the heap. All that's needed is for one random program jump to land on one copy of such code, and a successful attack begins.

But how does an outside entity manage to allocate thousands of copies of exploit code onto a remote computer?

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