This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Summary
Heap corruption is a serious error that can wreak havoc on your application. A single, off-by-one byte corruption can cause your application to exhibit all sorts of odd behaviors. The application might crash, it might have unpredictable behavior, or it might even go into infinite loops. To make things worse, the net result of a heap corruption typically does not surface until after the corruption has occurred, making it extremely difficult to figure out the source of the heap corruption. To efficiently track down heap corruptions, you need a solid understanding of the internals of the heap manager. The first part of the chapter discussed the low-level details of how the heap manager works. We took a look at how a heap block travels through the various layers of the heap manager and how the status and block structure changes as it goes from being allocated to freed. We also took a look at some of the most common forms of heap corruptions (unitialized state, heap over- and underruns, mismatched heap handles, and heap reuse after deletion) and how to manually analyze the heap at the point of a crash to figure out the source of the corruption. Additionally, we discussed how Application Verifier (pageheap) can be used to break execution closer to the source of the corruption, making it much easier to figure out the culprit. As some of the examples in this chapter show, heap corruptions might go undetected while software is being tested, only to surface on the customer's computer when run in a different environment and under different conditions. Making use of Application Verifier (pageheap) at all times is a prerequisite to ensuring that heap corruptions are detected before shipping software and avoiding costly problems on the customer site.