GrapheneOS/hardened_malloc

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1975 stars · 157 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

hardened_malloc is a security-focused general purpose memory allocator implementing the malloc API with extensive hardening against heap corruption vulnerabilities. It integrates with Android's Bionic libc and can be used as a dynamic library with musl and glibc on Linux-based platforms.

Use cases

• replace glibc malloc with a hardened allocator
• harden a Linux application against heap exploitation
• secure memory allocation on Android via Bionic integration
• reduce heap fragmentation and metadata overhead
• mitigate use-after-free and double-free vulnerabilities
• load a hardened allocator into existing binaries via LD_PRELOAD

When to choose

• you need strong protection against heap corruption exploits on Android or Linux
• you want a malloc replacement with quarantine, canaries, and write-after-free detection
• you are building a security-focused OS or hardened software distribution

When to avoid

• you need maximum allocator micro-benchmark performance over security
• you target 32-bit platforms or non-Linux operating systems
• you need Windows or macOS support

Facets

library · maturity active

security cryptography security operating-systems developer-tools cross-platform memory-allocator malloc hardening exploit-mitigation slab-allocator quarantine bionic musl glibc c android linux

Member repositories

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="GrapheneOS/hardened_malloc")