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Developments were mostly theoretical until the Morris worm, which exploited a buffer overflow in fingerd. [5] The field of computer security developed quickly thereafter, escalating with multitudes of new attacks such as the return-to-libc attack and defense techniques such as the non-executable stack [ 6 ] and address space layout randomization .
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.
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]
Stack buffer overflow is a type of the more general programming malfunction known as buffer overflow (or buffer overrun). [1] Overfilling a buffer on the stack is more likely to derail program execution than overfilling a buffer on the heap because the stack contains the return addresses for all active function calls.
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 memory leak has symptoms similar to a number of other problems and generally can only be diagnosed by a programmer with access to the program's source code. A related concept is the "space leak", which is when a program consumes excessive memory but does eventually release it. [3]
Segmentation faults can also occur independently of page faults: illegal access to a valid page is a segmentation fault, but not an invalid page fault, and segmentation faults can occur in the middle of a page (hence no page fault), for example in a buffer overflow that stays within a page but illegally overwrites 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 ...