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Comment by Uptrenda | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone in infosec ever seen the term "use after free" before LLMs? Or is this basically an acronym claude invented? I say this because I see claude use this term all the time like its common knowledge but in 15+ years in tech never seen it myself. I've seen all kinds of terms used to describe memory errors: memory corruption, heap corruption, stack corruption, whatever, just never this acronym.

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This is and has been a common term in any systems programming concept for decades. You can, for example, search CVEs and easily find some from over 15 years ago: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2010-1119

It was even enumerated in the first pass of CWE as CWE-416 in 2006.

if you have spend any amount of time in low level c vulnerabilities you will have heard about it, it is a very common time on the low level/cybersec space.

Yes, it was a common attack vector in binary exploitation. Heap based attack vector like use after free, double free, heap overflows, and others are pretty neat. They force you to learn a lot about how malloc works.

There is a lot of cool work that went into making memory allocation work well; the different arenas, fast bins, chunk headers, etc. are super cool.

yes, it’s a very common term in infosec. I haven’t heard the “UAF” acronym before though

I've heard of use after free, but I've only heard UAF to mean Ukraine Armed Forces.

It has been a known bug class for quite some time.

Huh? That is a really common term. There have been even memes about it. I remember roughly 5 years ago I first heard the ironic; "Real men use after free" in a discussion about Rust's benefits as its borrowing checker would have also prevented this one.

"Use after free" is also described in most standard books about C as a thing you should never do, have you read one?

I'm surprised that UAF as an acronym is apparently unusual even among people familiar with use-after-free as a concept. I thought that was a pretty typical acronym in the context of software.

I haven't really seen it as an acronym "UAF", but I can't recall the first time I heard "use after free". It was probably in the previous century.

The idea that Claude came up with it is ridiculous.

You have somehow lived in a strange bubble.

2025: https://redis.io/blog/security-advisory-cve-2025-49844/ 2023: https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2023/q2/133 2022: https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-22-1690/ 2014: https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/patches/5.4/common/008_o...

It's an issue as old as time, or thereabouts.

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