Understanding the Low Fragmentation Heap

Over the years, heap exploitation has continued to increase in difficulty, along with the complexity of heap algorithms and data structures. Due to anti-exploitation counter measures and lack of comprehensive heap knowledge, reliable exploitation has severely declined. Understanding of the inner workings of a memory manager can be the difference between unreliable failure and precise exploitation.

Beginning with Vista, the Low-Fragmentation heap has been the default front-end memory manager for the Windows operating system. This new front-end manager brought with it a different set of data structures and algorithms that replaced the look-aside list. This new system also changed the way back-end memory management works as well. All of this material must be reviewed to understand the repercussions of creating and destroying objects within an application on Windows 7.