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A buffer overflow; A stack overflow; Attempting to execute a program that does not compile correctly. (Some compilers [which?] will output an executable file despite the presence of compile-time errors.) In C code, segmentation faults most often occur because of errors in pointer use, particularly in C dynamic memory allocation.
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.
A stack buffer overflow can be caused deliberately as part of an attack known as stack smashing. If the affected program is running with special privileges, or accepts data from untrusted network hosts (e.g. a webserver ) then the bug is a potential security vulnerability .
In Windows NT, the booting process is initiated by NTLDR in versions before Vista and the Windows Boot Manager (BOOTMGR) in Vista and later. [4] The boot loader is responsible for accessing the file system on the boot drive, starting ntoskrnl.exe, and loading boot-time device drivers into memory.
On 5 January 1975, the 12-bit field that had been used for dates in the TOPS-10 operating system for DEC PDP-10 computers overflowed, in a bug known as "DATE75". The field value was calculated by taking the number of years since 1964, multiplying by 12, adding the number of months since January, multiplying by 31, and adding the number of days since the start of the month; putting 2 12 − 1 ...
The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is the foundational application programming interface (API) that allows a computer program to access the features of the Microsoft Windows operating system in which the program is running. Programs can access API functionality via shared-library technologies or via system-file access.
A malicious user may use the %s and %x format tokens, among others, to print data from the call stack or possibly other locations in memory. One may also write arbitrary data to arbitrary locations using the %n format token, which commands printf() and similar functions to write the number of bytes formatted to an address stored on the stack.
On system with BIOS firmware, the BIOS invokes MBR boot code from a hard disk drive at startup. The MBR boot code and the VBR boot code are OS-specific. In Microsoft Windows, the MBR boot code tries to find an active partition (the MBR is only 512 bytes), then executes the VBR boot code of an active partition.