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A year later, in 1996, Elias Levy (also known as Aleph One) published in Phrack magazine the paper "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit", [44] a step-by-step introduction to exploiting stack-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities. Since then, at least two major internet worms have exploited buffer overflows to compromise a large number of systems.
In an actual stack buffer overflow exploit the string of "A"'s would instead be shellcode suitable to the platform and desired function. If this program had special privileges (e.g. the SUID bit set to run as the superuser ), then the attacker could use this vulnerability to gain superuser privileges on the affected machine.
An accidental overflow may result in data corruption or unexpected behavior by any process that accesses the affected memory area. On operating systems without memory protection, this could be any process on the system. For example, a Microsoft JPEG GDI+ buffer overflow vulnerability could allow remote execution of code on the affected machine. [1]
Buffer overflow protection is any of various techniques used during software development to enhance the security of executable programs by detecting buffer overflows on stack-allocated variables, and preventing them from causing program misbehavior or from becoming serious security vulnerabilities. A stack buffer overflow occurs when a program ...
The worm showed a vulnerability in software distributed with IIS, described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-033, [5] for which a patch had become available a month earlier. The worm spread itself using a common type of vulnerability known as a buffer overflow. It did this by using a long string of the repeated letter 'N' to overflow a ...
A "return-to-libc" attack is a computer security attack usually starting with a buffer overflow in which a subroutine return address on a call stack is replaced by an address of a subroutine that is already present in the process executable memory, bypassing the no-execute bit feature (if present) and ridding the attacker of the need to inject their own code.
Often it is easy to confuse a new exploit with a new attack. New exploits are created all the time for the same attack patterns. The Buffer Overflow Attack Pattern is a good example. There are many known exploits and viruses that take advantage of a Buffer Overflow vulnerability. But they all follow the same pattern.
Local shellcode is used by an attacker who has limited access to a machine but can exploit a vulnerability, for example a buffer overflow, in a higher-privileged process on that machine. If successfully executed, the shellcode will provide the attacker access to the machine with the same higher privileges as the targeted process.