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Re:Being Sneaky in C by thaumaturgy on Friday June 12, 2015 @03:11PM (#9707941)
> And of course, some programs use replacements like dlmalloc and do all their own allocation management anyway.

Yeah. I wrote my own allocator in C++ a long time ago. I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't quite a few other bits of software out there doing the same thing.

Re:Being Sneaky in C by kayamon on Friday June 12, 2015 @03:20PM (#9707994)
Wasn't Heartbleed due to exactly that - using their own local allocator instead of calling malloc/free?
Re:Being Sneaky in C by thaumaturgy on Friday June 12, 2015 @03:36PM (#9708079)
Partly. They were using their own allocator (openssl_malloc()), but even then they would've been OK if it weren't for the OBO error elsewhere in the heartbeat implementation. If they were using an OS-supplied malloc() instead of openssl_malloc(), the bug would've still been exploitable on some operating systems, but not others.

Either way, "don't write your own allocator" is a good lesson to learn.

Unless, of course, you're doing it for fun. In which case, efficient heap management really is a neat exercise.

Re:Being Sneaky in C by ikeboy on Friday June 12, 2015 @03:31PM (#9708054)