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Developments were mostly theoretical until the Morris worm, which exploited a buffer overflow in fingerd. [5] The field of computer security developed quickly thereafter, escalating with multitudes of new attacks such as the return-to-libc attack and defense techniques such as the non-executable stack [6] and address space layout randomization.
A code sanitizer is a programming tool that detects bugs in the form of undefined or suspicious behavior by a compiler inserting instrumentation code at runtime. The class of tools was first introduced by Google's AddressSanitizer (or ASan) of 2012, which uses directly mapped shadow memory to detect memory corruption such as buffer overflows or accesses to a dangling pointer (use-after-free).
Visualization of a software buffer overflow. Data is written into A, but is too large to fit within A, so it overflows into B.. In programming and information security, a buffer overflow or buffer overrun is an anomaly whereby a program writes data to a buffer beyond the buffer's allocated memory, overwriting adjacent memory locations.
Canaries or canary words or stack cookies are known values that are placed between a buffer and control data on the stack to monitor buffer overflows. When the buffer overflows, the first data to be corrupted will usually be the canary, and a failed verification of the canary data will therefore alert of an overflow, which can then be handled, for example, by invalidating the corrupted data.
For instance, a program written in C may or may not crash when an input causes a buffer overflow. Rather the program's behavior is undefined . To make a fuzzer more sensitive to failures other than crashes, sanitizers can be used to inject assertions that crash the program when a failure is detected.
A NOP-sled is the oldest and most widely known technique for exploiting stack buffer overflows. [2] It solves the problem of finding the exact address of the buffer by effectively increasing the size of the target area. To do this, much larger sections of the stack are corrupted with the no-op machine instruction.
Buffer overflow is one of the most common programming flaws exploited by computer viruses, causing serious computer security issues (e.g. return-to-libc attack, stack-smashing protection) in widely used programs. In some cases programs can also incorrectly access the memory before the start of a buffer.
Buffer overflow; Memory management; Memory debugger; Plumbr is a popular memory leak detection tool for applications running on Java Virtual Machine. nmon (short for Nigel's Monitor) is a popular system monitor tool for the AIX and Linux operating systems.