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A memory debugger is a debugger for finding software memory problems such as memory leaks and buffer overflows. These are due to bugs related to the allocation and deallocation of dynamic memory . Programs written in languages that have garbage collection , such as managed code , might also need memory debuggers, e.g. for memory leaks due to ...
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.
A programmer wants to allocate a buffer of 100 bytes of memory while debugging. The system memory allocating routine will allocate 108 bytes instead, adding 4 leading and 4 trailing guard bytes, and return a pointer shifted by the 4 leading guard bytes to the right, hiding them from the programmer.
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.
to detect memory related errors, such as buffer overflows and use-after-free (using memory debuggers such as AddressSanitizer), to detect race conditions and deadlocks (ThreadSanitizer), to detect undefined behavior (UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer), to detect memory leaks (LeakSanitizer), or; to check control-flow integrity (CFISanitizer).
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).
This helps to prevent certain buffer overflow exploits from succeeding, particularly those that inject and execute code, such as the Sasser and Blaster worms. These attacks rely on some part of memory, usually the stack, being both writable and executable; if it is not, the attack fails.