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The ability to detect non-fatal errors is a major distinction between PurifyPlus and similar programs from the usual debuggers.By contrast, debuggers generally only allow the programmer to quickly find the sources of fatal errors, such as a program crash due to dereferencing a null pointer, but do not help to detect the non-fatal memory errors.
They may also be caused by programming errors alone. Buffer over-reads can result in erratic program behavior, including memory access errors, incorrect results, a crash, or a breach of system security. Thus, they are the basis of many software vulnerabilities and can be maliciously exploited to access privileged information. [citation needed]
In computing, a segmentation fault (often shortened to segfault) or access violation is a fault, or failure condition, raised by hardware with memory protection, notifying an operating system (OS) the software has attempted to access a restricted area of memory (a memory access violation).
For example, the Rust programming language implements a borrow checker to ensure memory safety, [12] while C and C++ provide no memory safety guarantees. The substantial amount of software written in C and C++ has motivated the development of external static analysis tools like Coverity, which offers static memory analysis for C. [13]
In many languages (e.g., the C programming language) deleting an object from memory explicitly or by destroying the stack frame on return does not alter associated pointers. The pointer still points to the same location in memory even though that location may now be used for other purposes. A straightforward example is shown below:
Memory corruption errors can be broadly classified into four categories: Using uninitialized memory: Contents of uninitialized memory are treated as garbage values. Using such values can lead to unpredictable program behavior. Using non-owned memory: It is common to use pointers to access and modify memory.
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If this overwrites adjacent data or executable code, this may result in erratic program behavior, including memory access errors, incorrect results, and crashes. Exploiting the behavior of a buffer overflow is a well-known security exploit. On many systems, the memory layout of a program, or the system as a whole, is well defined.