SwiftSweeper: Defeating Use-After-Free Bugs Using Memory Sweeper Without Stop-the-World
Junho Ahn, Kanghyuk Lee, Chanyoung Park, Hyungon Moon, Youngjin Kwon
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2025 · Day 1 · Memory Safety
The talk "SwiftSweeper: Defeating Use-After-Free Bugs Using Memory Sweeper Without Stop-the-World," presented by Junho Ahn and co-authored by Kanghyuk Lee, Chanyoung Park, Hyungon Moon, and Youngjin Kwon at IEEE S&P, addresses one of the most persistent and critical vulnerability classes in modern software: **Use-After-Free (UAF)** bugs. These vulnerabilities arise when a program attempts to access memory that has been deallocated, opening a window for attackers to manipulate memory and potentially achieve control flow hijacking or arbitrary code execution. The urgency of this problem is underscored by statistics such as Google's report that over half of the high-severity bugs discovered in Google Chrome in 2022 were UAF-related.