SAFE AND EFFICIENT ALLOCATION OF MEMORY

Aspects of the present invention are directed at centrally managing the allocation of memory to executable images in a way that inhibits malware from identifying the location of the executable image. Moreover, performance improvements are implemented over traditional systems that enable relative addressed instruction to be resolved at runtime. In this regard, a method is provided that identifies a randomized location to load the executable image into a memory address space. Then, data that may be used to resolve the relative addressed instruction is loaded and maintained in memory. At runtime when pages that store relative addressed instructions are accessed, an arithmetic operation is performed to resolve the relative addressed instruction. As a result, only those relative addressed instructions on pages accessed during program execution are resolved.