heap corruption

Nearly 10% of application crashes on Windows systems are due to heap corruption.

Normally, these errors would cause heap corruption, which would manifest itself only much later, usually in unrelated ways.

Whenever a heap corruption is detected, the application is killed to prevent successful completion of the exploit.

In addition, check-sums for heap blocks are maintained, which is used to detect unauthorized changes and heap corruption.

("dead bad") is used by the Android libc abort() function when native heap corruption is detected.

WER can now report errors even when the process is in a very bad state for example if the process has encountered stack exhaustions, PEB/TEB corruptions, heap corruptions etc.

That was helped by the classic Mac OS providing a little bit of protection against heap corruption using heap zones; if the application was to crash and the application's heap was corrupt, it could be thrown away.

The result of such actions can include heap corruption, premature destruction of a different (and newly created) object which happens to occupy the same location in memory as the multiply deleted object, and other forms of undefined behavior.

Later versions of Windows such as Vista, Server 2008 and Windows 7 include: Removal of commonly targeted data structures, heap entry metadata randomization, expanded role of heap header cookie, randomized heap base address, function pointer encoding, termination of heap corruption and algorithm variation.