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Memory corruption occurs in a computer program when the contents of a memory location are modified due to programmatic behavior that exceeds the intention of the original programmer or program/language constructs; this is termed as violation of memory safety. The most likely causes of memory corruption are programming errors (software bugs ...
A 2010 simulation study showed that, for a web browser, only a small fraction of memory errors caused data corruption, although, as many memory errors are intermittent and correlated, the effects of memory errors were greater than would be expected for independent soft errors. [8]
Data corruption can occur at any level in a system, from the host to the storage medium. Modern systems attempt to detect corruption at many layers and then recover or correct the corruption; this is almost always successful but very rarely the information arriving in the systems memory is corrupted and can cause unpredictable results.
A guard page typically halts the program, preventing memory corruption, but functions with large stack frames may bypass the page, and kernel code may not have the benefit of guard pages. Heap exhaustion – the program tries to allocate more memory than the amount available. In some languages, this condition must be checked for manually after ...
Address space layout randomization (ASLR) is a computer security technique involved in preventing exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities. [1] In order to prevent an attacker from reliably redirecting code execution to, for example, a particular exploited function in memory, ASLR randomly arranges the address space positions of key data areas of a process, including the base of the ...
If the program writes to memory referenced by a dangling pointer, a silent corruption of unrelated data may result, leading to subtle bugs that can be extremely difficult to find. If the memory has been reallocated to another process, then attempting to dereference the dangling pointer can cause segmentation faults (UNIX, Linux) or general ...
Conventional memory layout usually places one bit of many different correction words adjacent on a chip. So, even a multi-cell upset leads to only a number of separate single-bit upsets in multiple correction words, rather than a multi-bit upset in a single correction word.
Data degradation is the gradual corruption of computer data due to an accumulation of non-critical failures in a data storage device. It is also referred to as data decay, data rot or bit rot. [1] This results in a decline in data quality over time, even when the data is not being utilized.