Top Chunk (Wilderness) Attacks

The top chunk is the final boundary of the heap. Corrupting it can force the allocator to behave unexpectedly during heap growth.

TechniqueDescription
House of ForceThe original arbitrary-malloc wilderness attack.
sysmalloc _int_freeImplicitly freeing the top chunk into unsorted bin.
House of OrangeThe legendary top chunk corruption + FSOP.
House of TangerineModern House of Orange for recent glibc.
Table 1: Exploits targeting the wilderness and sysmalloc.