Technical Tip: ASLR on FortiGate and memory usage concerns.

[npaiva]

Description	This article describes ASLR. ASLR stands for Address Space Layout Randomization, a computer security technique that randomizes the memory addresses of key areas of a running program, such as executables and system libraries. By randomizing these memory locations at each launch, ASLR makes it significantly harder for attackers to successfully execute code injection or buffer overflow attacks, which often rely on knowing the fixed addresses of these components to exploit vulnerabilities.
Scope	FortiGate.
Solution	ASLR has been implemented as a security feature to harden FortiOS. This feature has an impact on memory usage, therefore low ends models with 4GB of RAM have only partial ASLR implementation, which already has an impact of 7% when idle. This setting cannot be changed or disabled: Memory increase on low-end models with 4 GB RAM and ASLR - FortiOS 7.4.8 release notes. Appliances with 8GB or more have full ASLR implemented. This feature does not run on low end appliances with 2GB of RAM.