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this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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The way that rust attempts to prevent this class of error is not by making an implementation of free that is safe to call twice, but by making the compiler refuse to compile programs where free could be called twice on a pointer.
Anyway, use after free doesn't depend on a double free. It just means that the program frees memory but keeps the pointer (which now points at memory that could contain unrelated data at some future point in time) and if someone trying to exploit the program finds a way to induce the program to read or write to that memory they may be able to access data they are not expected to, or write data to be used by a different part of the program that they shouldn't be able to
Thanks, I understand the problem with using memory after it's been freed and possibly access it changed by another part of the process. I guess I was confused by the double free explanation I read, which didn't really say how it could be exploited, but I think you are right it still needs to be accessed later by the original program, which would not happen in Rust.