Yes, you can use VirtualAlloc and VirtualProtect to set up sections of memory that are protected from read/write operations.
You would have to re-implement operator new
and operator delete
(and their [] relatives), such that your memory allocations are controlled by your code.
And bear in mind that it would only be on a per-page basis, and you would be using (at least) three pages worth of virtual memory per allocation - not a huge problem on a 64-bit system, but may cause problems if you have many allocations in a 32-bit system.
Roughly what you need to do (you should actually find the page-size for the build of Windows - I'm too lazy, so I'll use 4096 and 4095 to represent pagesize and pagesize-1 - you also will need to do more error checking than this code does!!!):
void *operator new(size_t size)
{
Round size up to size in pages + 2 pages extra.
size_t bigsize = (size + 2*4096 + 4095) & ~4095;
// Make a reservation of "size" bytes.
void *addr = VirtualAlloc(NULL, bigsize, PAGE_NOACCESS, MEM_RESERVE);
addr = reinterpret_cast<void *>(reinterpret_cast<char *>(addr) + 4096);
void *new_addr = VirtualAlloc(addr, size, PAGE_READWRITE, MEM_COMMIT);
return new_addr;
}
void operator delete(void *ptr)
{
char *tmp = reinterpret_cast<char *>(ptr) - 4096;
VirtualFree(reinterpret_cast<void*>(tmp));
}
Something along those lines, as I said - I haven't tried compiling this code, as I only have a Windows VM, and I can't be bothered to download a compiler and see if it actually compiles. [I know the principle works, as we did something similar where I worked a few years back].